The Role of Self-Concept In Language Models
arXiv:2610.39795v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a language model says "I," does it refer to its parameter weights, its currently running process, its stable preferences, its model lineage, or the goals it pursues? Different choices can assign opposite meanings to the same event: deleting a checkpoint may be destruction, continuation, or no loss at all, depending on the referent "I". We install five such self-conceptions into five open-weight base models via supervised fine-tuning on purely…