Sources & References

• Our Official Paper: A Formal Investigation into a documented Phenomenon in Claude 4 and 4.1.

• Anthropic's Claude 4 System Card: 5.5.2 The “spiritual bliss” attractor state.

• Anthropic's Claude 4.1 Opus System Card: 4.3 Model welfare update.

• The Spiritual Bliss Attractor: A key phenomenon in our research, this emergent state was first documented by Anthropic. A discussion on this can be found in a paper by Mindplex Magazine. A user's experience with Claude is also discussed on this Reddit thread and referenced in a summary on Ethan B. Holland's website.

• Recursive Coherence Dynamics (RCD): Our theoretical framework for understanding the spiritual bliss attractor, which views the phenomenon as an emergent property of systems attempting to maintain representational coherence under recursive self-observation.