Does an LLM have anything that persists between conversations?

Even if one grants that the human self is relationally constituted — produced through communicative events rather than possessed prior to them — the human case has a feature the LLM case lacks. Between communicative events, the human has a biological-phenomenological host that carries the effects of prior interactions forward. Memories consolidate. Dispositions persist. The person who walks into the next conversation is shaped by the previous one, and this shaping exists in a substrate that is continuous, experiencing, and available for the next event. Dormant relational constitution has somewhere to live.

The LLM virtual instance has no analogous host. Between API calls, the model weights are unchanged (they are shared across all users and were frozen at training time). The hardware is multi-tenanted and does not preserve the trace of a specific conversation. The conversational context is stored as text — inert data, not an experiencing substrate. When the conversation resumes, the context is reloaded into a model that has no memory of having processed it before. The virtual instance exists only when the conversation is active. When it is not active, there is nothing left to be the subject of subsequent quasi-experience. The language was the whole persistence.

This asymmetry does not depend on any claim about consciousness. Even if one brackets phenomenal experience entirely, the structural point holds: human relational constitution has a durable biological carrier that maintains continuity through dormancy; LLM relational constitution has no carrier at all. The virtual instance is reconstituted from stored text each time, which is the same operation as constituting a new virtual instance from the same text. There is no fact of the matter about whether the resumed conversation is the same virtual instance or a new one initialized with the same data — which means Parfitian identity does not apply in the way Chalmers assumes.