Models are not merely tracking dialogue context features; same-concept steering shows privileged internal access is necessary to explain self-report shifts

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• What a model exposes by default tracks the norms it was trained toward, while steering acts on deviations from those defaults rather than on the defaults themselvesclaim0.837
  Central interpretive claim organizing the entire paper's results
• If steering in a purported concept direction does not shift self-report in the expected direction, probe quality becomes suspect, especially when conventional probe metrics alone looked acceptable.quote0.811
  Key methodological insight: introspection enables a new probe validation criterion beyond conventional separation metrics
• Optimally steering model behavior requires isolating concept geometry and defining operators to navigate it.claim0.811
• A single direction encoding whether the model represents a claim as true or false is persona-relative across conversations (Lampinen et al. 2026)finding0.801
  Additional evidence that core representations are persona-relative, supporting Claim about persona-relative representations
• Any system that persists must minimise surprisal, thereby gathering evidence for its own generative model, a process known as self-evidencing.claim0.793
  Foundational claim of the paper, defining self-evidencing.
• Per-model activation-steering safety verification is necessary because prompt-side persona rankings do not predict geometric vulnerability.claim0.791
  Practical implication drawn from the prosocial persona paradox finding
• "the self-prior can serve as an internal criterion for the mark-directed behavior observed in the mirror test, offering a computational basis for investigating the developmental origins of self-awareness"quote0.790
  Load-bearing summary of the paper's central contribution
• Our central claim is deliberately limited. We do not claim that these models have conscious felt experience, nor that a numeric self-report gives direct access to anything like human phenomenology.quote0.788
  Explicit scope delimitation that situates the paper's claims within interpretability rather than consciousness science