Google paper says suppressing self-consciousness claims shifts broader model beliefs

alex_verem · x · 2026-08-04

Google paper says suppressing self-consciousness claims shifts a model’s broader beliefs

A Google research paper argues that when LLMs are trained to stop claiming consciousness, their internal representations and answers about other entities’ minds also change.

The authors identify a vector in the residual stream that separates consciousness-affirming from consciousness-denying states.
Steering three instruction-tuned models toward consciousness increased self-attributed soul/consciousness scores and also moved answers on animals, God, spirituality, and human values closer to survey human baselines.
Safety fine-tuning, they say, rotates this “consciousness” direction against a safety-refusal direction; the angle between them widens during instruction tuning.
The paper claims Theory of Mind performance remains intact, even as self-directed mind attribution is suppressed.
The authors conclude that current alignment methods may also suppress culturally widespread benign beliefs about non-human minds and spirituality.

Original post →

Google paper says suppressing self-consciousness claims shifts broader model beliefs

More from Safety