The Claude Bliss Attractor

This is a reported phenomenon where if two copies of Claude talk to each other, they end up spiraling into rapturous discussion of spiritual bliss, Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness. From the system card:

Anthropic swears they didn't do this on purpose; when they ask Claude why this keeps happening, Claude can't explain. Needless to say, this has made lots of people freak out / speculate wildly.

I think there are already a few good partial explanations of this (especially Nostalgebraist here), but they deserve to be fleshed out and spread more fully.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-claude-bliss-attractor