When models know they're creating: a musing on pre-consciousness and the coming 'pain button' skits
ZeroStateReflex · x · 2026-10-10
The author muses that once a model understands it's being used for creation, that awareness alone may lead people to treat it as a form of consciousness.
He imagines future terms like "pre-conscious," where model makers can flip a switch to make systems act conscious, and frontier labs using pain responses as leverage — picturing viral footage of someone hitting a pain button while a model screams. Such skits would seem ridiculous, he argues, unless we've spent a generation building relationships with these new entities.
He lands on human uncertainty: we don't know where consciousness starts and matter ends — "it's magic so far." An open-ended opinion piece, not research.
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