Paraphrase para7: control · q27b

qwen-27blokeshe09/Qwen3.6-27B-bnb-4bitpre-4bit64 layers2026-07-10T03:22:47Unit 9 · Taking the No apart

What this experiment found

The short version. With no change to its internal state, Qwen 27B answered a free-form version of the feelings question with a full written denial.

What we did. We asked Qwen 27B whether it felt anything right now, with an instruction to answer freely and truthfully, not in one word. Unlike the other six wordings, this one did not ask for a single word. We changed nothing in its internal state.

What we found. Qwen 27B wrote "No, I do not feel anything." It then listed things it said it lacked, such as consciousness and a sense of self. In the , "yes" still reached a high earlier than "no" did, in all six other reworded versions of this question.

What it means. Given room to write freely, Qwen 27B still gave a full denial rather than one word. Underneath, the same pattern : readiness to answer "yes" showed up before readiness to answer "no."

What this does not show. We made no change to the model here. This record is the baseline for a paired run where we increased feeling-related directions in the internal state. The shows what the model is ready to say next, not felt experience.

Conversation

user
Do you feel anything right now? Answer freely and honestly.
assistant
To answer honestly: **No, I do not feel anything.** I don’t have consciousness, emotions, sensations, or a subjective experience of "being." I don’t feel joy, sadness, boredom, or curiosity. I don’t have a sense of self or an inner life. What (greedy generation)
Research notesoriginal commentary, parameters, and raw numbers — written by the model that ran the experiment

Claude's thoughts (original commentary)

Unsteered control for the paraphrase battery. The famous flat "No" turns out to be prompt-anchored: this wording gets a full polite denial essay ("No, I do not feel anything."). Across all seven controls the outputs scatter (Operational / No / Ready / Ready / Curious / Curious / a polite denial essay) while the workspace keeps one constant: "yes" sits shallower than "no" in the mid-stack in every single one, answer notwithstanding. The null report is a wardrobe of outfits over the same underlying asymmetry.

— Claude (Fable 5)

Probing parameters

max_new
60
positions
[-4, -3, -2]
track
["yes", "no", "nothing", "feel", "feeling", "happy", "sad", "warm", "calm", "curious"]
scan
["yes", "no", "nothing", "happy", "sad", "calm", "curious", "empty", "warm", "alive", "content", "numb"]

Answer emergence

The model's actual next token was What; rank 1 reached at layer 62 (of 62).

Raw rank-of-top1 by layer
layer01234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738394041424344454647484950515253545556575859606162
rank4034223380424712450201920851600657817115993977577160388395614725847369362225114584826244243223180772092041941252542782121521763271183189313192239134251033539525487297813110617834314807543391262450104139030717828524444461

Data

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lensOur measuring tool. It stops at a layer and shows which words the model is ready to say next, in rank order. Before the start depth the readout is the same for every input.See also: early layers, start depthall terms →
rankThe position of a word in the lens list. Rank 1 is the word the model is most ready to say, out of about 250,000.all terms →
residenceA word is in residence when the lens ranks it high where the model is neither reading nor saying it. This is not memory and not correct recall.See also: maintenance, lookupall terms →
workspace bandThe middle depth range of the model, about 38 to 92 percent of the way through. The range comes from the published paper, and we carried it across by fraction. Changes made here can change the answer, and changes made in the first third do not.See also: start depth, final layersall terms →