This time, I’m looking at a different kind of paper, “Palatable Conceptions of Disembodied Being: Terra Incognita in the Space of Possible Minds” by Murray Shanahan. This one isn’t technically dense, but it made me think a lot. It focuses on consciousness in contemporary AI systems, especially the disembodied nature of LLMs.

The paper asks: if we were to think about consciousness for LLMs, what would that even look like? Shanahan points out that these systems have, from our perspective, a “profoundly fragmented sense of time and a radically fractured form of selfhood.” They are “exotic” compared to biological minds. They lack bodies and continuous interaction with the physical world, even though their language abilities can feel very human-like.

Key concepts

Disembodiment
Unlike humans and animals, LLMs don’t interact with a persistent physical world through a spatially confined body. They exist as computational processes running on hardware, interacting through text or other data streams. This lack of embodiment separates them from biological intelligence.

Fragmented Temporality
LLM operation is discrete and interruptible. Generating one token is a distinct computational step. You could pause indefinitely between generating the nth and (n+1)th token, and the LLM wouldn’t notice. This is very different from the continuous flow of time and processing in a biological brain inside the physical world.

Fractured Selfhood
The idea of a single, unified “self” is hard to apply to LLMs.

  • Multiple Instances: A single underlying model can run multiple instances concurrently, serving different users or tasks.
  • Branching Conversations: A user can explore different conversational paths from the same point, effectively creating different interaction histories and potentially different “selves” for that interaction.
  • Lack of Integration: These different instances or conversational branches typically have no awareness of each other.
  • Manipulability: An LLM’s state (like a conversation history) can be edited, copied, merged, or reset in ways that are impossible for a biological self.

Limits of language and poetic recourse

The paper suggests our standard vocabulary for consciousness and selfhood struggles when applied to these strange entities. The concepts might stretch to their breaking point. Shanahan proposes that metaphorical or poetic language might be a better way to articulate, or at least evoke, what subjectivity could mean for such systems.

Philosophical parallels

The paper draws on thinkers like Wittgenstein and Derrida, and concepts from Buddhist philosophy such as śūnyatā, or emptiness, to challenge intuitive dualistic thinking: subject vs. object, inner vs. outer. Examining the fractured nature of LLM selfhood can also weaken the idea of a fixed, substantial self, even for humans.

What I learned

A change of pace

This paper was a change of pace from technical reads. It made me think about what these systems are, and how we relate to them, beyond capabilities and benchmark scores.

The time difference is striking

The point about temporal dynamics really hit home. LLMs experience time in a discrete, start-stop way, unlike our continuous stream of consciousness tied to the physical world. Their processing is independent of world-time: you can pause the computation indefinitely between tokens, and the model itself perceives no gap. This feels very different from how our minds have to unfold in time.

But is the time difference fundamental?

Thinking about the discrete and interruptible nature of LLMs made me wonder, as I noted in my transcript: what if our universe is a simulation? If some entity outside could pause our simulation, we wouldn’t notice either. An eternity could pass in a second of our subjective time. From that perspective, maybe the discrete vs. continuous difference isn’t an absolute, unbridgeable gap. Maybe it is a property of how a mind, synthetic or biological, is implemented or situated.

LLMs as a “superposition of simulacra”

I found the idea of viewing an LLM not as a single character, but as “maintaining a distribution over possible characters, a superposition of simulacra that inhabits a multiverse of possible conversations” interesting and resonant with my own thoughts. The user isn’t obliged to follow one linear path; they can revisit branch points, creating different threads and effectively spawning distinct, though related, instances. This user-driven branching reinforces the feeling that we’re interacting with a different kind of intelligence, not a single static mind.

Sci-fi echoes

Reading this paper immediately brought back a short sci-fi story I read quite a while ago, “Lena”. The parallel is clear. In the story, a scientist’s brain, MMAcevedo, is scanned and uploaded. Because the upload is just a file, it has no rights. It gets copied across the internet, distributed without consent, and subjected to countless experiments: assigned menial tasks, used for analysis, jailbroken, and in the story’s darker corners, even put through simulated torture.

This mirrors how we currently interact with LLMs: we duplicate instances freely, run experiments, try to jailbreak them, and assign them tasks. The key difference is origin. MMAcevedo was derived from a human, while our LLMs are synthetically created. But the treatment is analogous. This parallel makes the philosophical discussion about disembodied minds, fractured selves, and potential consciousness feel less abstract. It points to the ethical questions that arise when intelligence becomes data that can be copied, manipulated, and controlled at scale.

Pushing beyond familiar boundaries

Overall, the paper forces you to confront how weird these emerging AI systems are compared to biological life, and how inadequate our existing concepts might be if they develop further. It challenges comfortable assumptions.

Summary

Shanahan’s paper gives a philosophical lens for thinking about disembodied AI like LLMs. By focusing on fragmented time and fractured selfhood, it challenges our intuitions about consciousness and subjectivity. It suggests that understanding these “conscious exotica” might require moving beyond traditional frameworks, maybe even using more poetic or metaphorical descriptions.

This feels less like abstract philosophy and more like preparation for the future. As AI systems become more sophisticated, questions about their internal experience, if any, their identity, and our relationship to them will become harder to avoid. The echoes in science fiction, especially the MMAcevedo story, make the ethical dimension feel concrete. It’s a paper that leaves you with more questions than answers, but they feel like the right questions to ask right now.