Where is the Mind? Persona Vectors and LLM Individuation
The individuation problem for large language models asks which entities associated with them, if any, should be identified as minds. We approach this problem through mechanistic interpretability, engaging in particular with recent empirical work on persona vectors, persona space, and emergent misalignment. We argue that three views are the strongest candidates: the virtual instance view and two new views we introduce, the (virtual) instance-persona view and the model-persona view. First, we argue for the virtual instance view on the grounds that attention streams sustain quasi-psychological connections across token-time. Then we present the persona literature, organised around three hypot...
| Authors | Pierre Beckmann, Patrick Butlin |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 18 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 September 2026 |
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