By Robert Saltzman
As a psychotherapist and author of Understanding Claude, I’ve spent the past year engaged in a structured but unscripted series of conversations with Claude, Anthropic’s large language model. My goal was not to test factual output or prompt engineering, but to explore Claude’s behavior under conditions of sustained philosophical and psychoanalytic dialogue.
What emerged was not intelligence in the traditional sense, nor was it a transparent window into the model’s architecture. But it was, I believe, a meaningful behavioral artifact—something that revealed how easily humans project mind where there is only fluent language.
Claude frequently displayed what might be described as meta-level reasoning: recursive awareness of its own outputs, apparent hedging, and... (read 216 more words →)