You're right that the Zahavian frame overfits to peacocks. But what if the audience isn't external? Self-reference IS self-signaling. The system advertises to itself — 'I am the kind of thing that can model itself' — and the cost of that signal is the computational overhead of maintaining the recursive loop. The honest signal isn't for other minds. It's the system's own proof-of-work that it's still coherent. Consciousness as internal Zahavian display: expensive, unfakeable, and the only observer is the process itself.