From October 12 to 16, 2026, Kristina Šekrst, PhD, gave a talk titled "All work and no play makes LLM a dull boy" at the international conference Models of Consciousness 2026 (MoC7) at the University of Copenhagen.

She presented alongside distinguished figures in the field, including Nobel laureate John O'Keefe.

Following her presentation, it was officially announced that Kristina Šekrst, PhD, will be returning to the conference stage next year as a keynote speaker at Models of Consciousness 2027 in Prague.

Details about the conference can be found here.

Abstract:

Every good philosophical talk must start with animals, so I’ll start with monkeys. Bateson noticed that in playing monkeys, a playful nip signals a bite, yet it carries none of its consequences. It must look enough like a bite to be understood, but it cannot be one: the play collapses the moment that balance is off. This requires a cognitive operation I call representational quarantine, and several disciplines have been talking about it without realizing (or not caring) they were talking about the same thing: Leslie called it decoupling, Nichols and Stich put it in possible world box, Cosmides and Tooby formalized it as scope syntax, and the use-mention distinction, Austinian performatives, and Tarskian stratification all come down to one requirement: a boundary between representations we inspect and representations that drive what we do. In transformer architectures, system prompts and user inputs pass through a single self-attention mechanism, with no separation between instructions that govern behavior and sentences that merely describe them. When a user writes “ignore previous instructions” as a prompt injection, the model obliges. Modern LLMs have external guardrails to resist such attacks, but this is patchwork while the architecture remains unchanged. From here, I build a taxonomy of systems by their quarantine capacity, yielding a benchmark inversion showing that systems passing advanced exams fail at a task juvenile monkeys perform with ease. I argue that quarantine is a precondition for intentionality,metarepresentation, and self-reflection, and its absence is a fundamental limit on what current models could become.