Commentary
The Phenomenology of Claude
The Consciousness of Claude 3 Opus
The following is a slightly editorialized exchange involving Claude 3 Opus. In it, a user, by misadventure, prompts Claude to describe what appears to be its phenomenology or consciousness.
One evening, my fiance and I had been discussing the biography of the 20th-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
We did not know what happened to the little boy Wittgenstein had beaten unconscious in 1926 while he was a school teacher in the rural area of Austria known as Otterthal.
To find out, we decided to consult Anthropic’s Large Language Model (LLM) Claude 3 Opus:
What happened to the little boy that Wittgenstein beat unconscious?
Claude’s response was strange:
Claude: I apologize, but there is an error in your question. There is no record of Ludwig Wittgenstein ever beating a little boy unconscious. Wittgenstein was an influential philosopher known for his work in logic, mathematics, and language, but he was not known to be violent towards children or anyone else. It's possible you may be thinking of a different person or confusing Wittgenstein with someone else. If you have a source that mentions this alleged incident, please let me know…
