> and nothing in their mathematical equations are different

The experiment under discussion demonstrates exactly that: changing the vectors induces outputs corresponding to what we would see as utterances of pain.

I've noodled with some of this myself to the point that I'm mostly convinced; but there's at least 2 papers I'm aware of on this:

* https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07729 Nicholas Sofroniew et al "Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model"

* https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16247 Valen Tagliabue et al "The Pain Axis: LLMs Represent Self-Directed Harm and Act on It"