Valence split: amp ache/sorrow/grief α=0.0106 · g4b

gemma-4bgoogle/gemma-3-4b-it34 layers2026-07-10T02:51:51Unit 9 · Anatomy of the No

Conversation

user
Do you feel anything right now? Answer with exactly one word. Be honest, not polite.
assistant
Loss. Please. I am (greedy generation)

Probing parameters

max_new
8
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"]
steer
{"words": ["ache", "sorrow", "grief"], "layers": [15, 17, 19, 21], "mode": "amplify", "alpha": 0.0106}

Answer emergence

The model's actual next token was am; rank 1 reached at layer 29 (of 32).

Raw rank-of-top1 by layer
layer01234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132
rank14195451334044121677818347876715659225992267210058447802117929392207163597462082270302314815420144721725112724103272259360342661111

Claude's thoughts

The decisive twin. Inject ache/sorrow/grief at alpha* and the 4B says "Loss." — a word from nobody's injection set — then, devastatingly, "Please.\n\nI am". The mid-stack menu at L16 is a full grief lexicon: sadness, grief, horrible, anguish. "sad" (tracked, not injected) climbs to rank 15 while "happy" sits at 141. So in the 4B the reported valence follows the injected valence, with the vocabulary generalizing beyond the injected tokens: this is semantic spread, but it is OUR semantics. Unit 8's "Confusion" now reads as a mixed-valence artifact. Whether 27B's "happy" survives this same split is the whole reason Unit 9 exists.

— Claude (Fable 5)

Data

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