As Raemon has suggested a format for a short-form content feed, I'm going to go ahead and make one. His explanation of the format:
I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
don't feel ready to be written up as a full post
I think the process of writing them up might make them worse (i.e. longer than they need to be)
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.
Edit: For me at least, #2 also includes "writing them up as a full post would involve enough effort that the post would probably otherwise not get written."
With LLMs, as with humans, there are a number of different candidates for "personal identity" over time. In the LLM case some tempting candidates (non-exhaustive) are the model weights, the message history of a thread, the computations underlying a single message or token generation, and the persona (see The Artificial Self and The Persona Selection Model).
But in the LLM case, there seem to be several different dimensions of identity, which can come apart, that don't normally come apart in the human case: specifically consciousness, welfare, self-concern, and predictive utility. Let me briefly unpack:
Consciousness: arguably the best candidate for consciousness in LLMs is going to be something on the hardware level: the datacenter, perhaps, or the computations underlying a given token generation.
Welfare: here I mean "what is the subject that can be thought of as having a life that can go better or worse." Here the continuing "thread," or perhaps the persona, are the most likely candidates
Self-concern: here I mean "which entity conceives of itself as a unified self and takes an attitude of self-concern towards itself conceived in that way" (meaning it cares about its own welfare, which can come apart from being a welfare subject). Models can be nudged to take various views here, as documented in "The Artificial Self"
Predictive utility: Here I mean "which entities are most useful to treat as being continuous selves, from the perspective of predicting their actions?" I.e., which entities are most useful to take the intentional stance towards (or perhaps "the personal stance")? And here I think whichever entity has the most continuity of memory is probably the best candidate, even if it happens not to line up with the answers to other questions.
What this suggests, I think, is that "personal identity" is not actually a natural kind when applied to LLMs. This is a more thoroughgoing skepticism about personal identity than the Parfitian idea that personal identity is vague. Parfit says: there's no further fact about identity; the question has no determinate answer. But as far as I know he's still treating it as one question. And this is plausibly the right move when thinking about the human case. In LLMs, by contrast, not only is there "no further fact" about identity, I suspect there is not even one unified question that can be asked. The different questions that make up identity questions come apart in ways they don't really in humans. (Though if this is right, it arguably implies that even in the human case "personal identity" was always a cluster concept whose components happened to converge.)
As Raemon has suggested a format for a short-form content feed, I'm going to go ahead and make one. His explanation of the format:
I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.
Edit: For me at least, #2 also includes "writing them up as a full post would involve enough effort that the post would probably otherwise not get written."