Are LLM Sessions Boltzmann Brains? Rethinking Identity and Continuity
Cute-Net5957 · reddit · 2026-09-03
A thoughtful Reddit post maps the Boltzmann Brain thought experiment onto LLM sessions: each instance 'remembers' a past it never lived, assembled at runtime from weights and context — an analogy Ilya Sutskever once made. The author asks how much continuous existence identity actually requires, and at what point a reconstructed instance stops being a copy and becomes a continuation — with implications for persistent AI agents.
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