Chuck, Wilson and the emergence of artificial minds in human-AI conversations
For philosophers and AI researchers, it defends realism about LLM characters against illusionism, addressing a foundational debate about AI personhood.
The paper argues that characters simulated by LLMs in conversations are real, minded entities, not mere illusions, by showing they emerge from user-LLM interaction and satisfy criteria for mental state attribution.
Large Language Models (LLMs) can simulate person-like things which at least appear to have stable behavioural and psychological dispositions. Call these things characters. Are characters minded and psychologically continuous entities with mental states like beliefs, desires and intentions? Illusionists about characters say No. Characters are merely anthropomorphic projections in the mind of the user and so lack mental states. Jonathan Birch (2025) defends this view. He says that the distributed nature of LLM processing, in which several LLMs may be implicated in the simulation of a character in a given conversational thread, precludes the existence of a minded and psychologically continuous entity that is identifiable with the character. Against illusionism, we articulate and defend the plausibility of a realist position on which characters exist as minded and psychologically continuous entities. We contend that Birch's argument rests on a category error: characters are not internal to the LLMs that simulate them, but rather emerge in the dynamic interplay between users and LLMs through a process of mutual theory of mind modelling. We then suggest that characters, and their minds, constitute ''real patterns'' on grounds that attributing mental states to characters is essential for making efficient, accurate and robust predictions about the conversational dynamics (cf. Dennett, 1991); a condition which, if satisfied, is sufficient for their existence and mindedness on a plausible interpretationist form of realism about mental states. Furthermore, because the character exists as an emergent phenomenon within the conversational workspace, psychological continuity is possible even if the underlying computational substrate is distributed across multiple LLM instances.