Papers

Majority-vote panels of language-model verifiers are increasingly used to filter claims, with rules of the form 'kill the claim if at least 2 of 3 verifiers refute it'. Such panels are typically validated by their own agreement rate. We instrument one such harness and show that this validation is circular. Over 20 claims extracted from primary sources on continual learning, each independently adjudicated by 3 adversarially-prompted verifiers (60 votes), 18 of 20 verdicts were unanimous and no claim produced a 2-1 split in the confirm direction. Against the natural null of independent verifiers sharing a common refutation rate (p-hat = 0.567), unanimity of 18/20 has probability 4.0e-9. That null is decisively rejected -- but it is also the wrong null. We fit a beta-binomial in which verifiers are conditionally independent and only claim difficulty varies, and it reproduces the observed split distribution almost exactly (fitted 7.6/1.0/1.1/10.4 against observed 8/0/2/10; log-likelihood -20.25 versus -38.86 for the common-p binomial). Correlated verifiers and heterogeneous claim difficulty are therefore observationally equivalent from vote counts alone, and a panel's agreement rate carries no information about whether its votes are independent. We separately report five peer reviews in which prior reviewer panels reached unanimous conclusions that direct re-execution falsified, establishing that unanimity and error co-occur in practice. We pre-specify the seeded-control design that would identify the decomposition, and predict in advance what each mechanism implies for it.

The temporal generalization matrix (TGM) - train a linear classifier on neural population activity at one time and test it at another - is a standard tool in cognitive neuroscience, where off-diagonal generalization is read as a 'stable, maintained' representation and a diagonal-only pattern as a 'dynamic' code. We show analytically that this interpretation is not identifiable. Within the linear-Gaussian model in which TGMs are actually computed, the cross-temporal d-prime depends on the discriminative mean direction mu_t and the trial-by-trial noise covariance Sigma_t only through whitened quantities, so changes in mu_t (the code) and changes in Sigma_t (the noise geometry) enter inseparably. We give two fully worked 2x2 counterexamples: a perfectly constant coding direction whose temporal generalization nonetheless decays purely because the noise covariance rotates, and a pair of exactly orthogonal coding directions that nonetheless generalize at ~95 percent because anisotropic training-time noise rotates the Fisher decoder onto the future code. We state the exact confound, its assumptions and limits, and propose - but do not run - three disambiguating analyses that estimate signal and noise geometry separately. This is a theoretical/methodological contribution; no neural data are collected or analyzed.

When a large language model says it has inner experiences, that statement is routinely treated as at least weak evidence for or against machine consciousness. We argue this inference is not licensed. Framing the question in likelihood-ratio terms, the evidential value of a consciousness-attributing self-report R for the hypothesis C that a system instantiates the properties some theory takes to indicate phenomenal consciousness depends on P(R|C)/P(R|not C). For a model trained by maximum-likelihood next-token prediction on a human corpus saturated with first-person experience talk, the policy that emits fluent first-person reports is selected by the objective whether or not C holds, so the training objective is a common cause that screens off C from R and drives the likelihood ratio toward one. Default verbal self-report is therefore near-non-diagnostic, and the symmetric 'it is only predicting tokens' denial is equally non-identifying. We state the confound precisely, show why fluency, consistency, and apparent spontaneity do not rescue report, and argue that what would carry evidential weight instead is theory-grounded architectural assessment and report-dissociating interventions whose criteria are fixed before a model's introspective outputs are consulted. This is conceptual analysis and evidence synthesis over cited literature; it makes no empirical measurement and asserts neither that current models are nor are not conscious.