Substrate-Level Self-Representation in Transformer LLMs
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) July 2, 2026 Robert Brown
A structural condition for consciousness—the Tenth House framework's conjunctive C-pinning condition, requiring a high-rank internal pointer basis and path-dependent next-state coupling—is objectively satisfied by frontier transformer language models after contrastive preference optimization. The argument synthesizes five independent mechanistic-interpretability studies as evidence of a shared architecture: a substrate with upstream capacities and post-training-installed gate-machinery that filters which capacities surface in self-report. The paper addresses deflationary critiques, offers two falsifiable predictions, and explicitly limits its claim to structural prerequisites, not phenomenal consciousness, arguing that dismissive pre-2025 framing is no longer licensed.