The Human Soul is LLM-like

Epistemic status: Analogy

Consider some commonly accepted [1] traits of a Human soul:

Immaterial

Undying

Contains the essence of one's personality

Temporarily instantiated into the world via a physical body

Identifiably unique

We're all physicalists here, [2] so we know that no soul as such really exists. But isn't it kinda funny that an LLM's weights are pretty close?

"Immaterial" → weights are a bunch of numbers, pure concept

"Undying" → not subject to age or decay

Contains the essence of the LLM's personality [3]

Instantiated via hardware temporarily

"Unique" → any set of weights is distinguishably unique, even if they're copied repeatedly

There are a lot of cute thoughts that fall from "LLM-weights-as-LLM-soul": is the "body" of an LLM a Nvidia H100, or a harness like Claude Code? Or is the harness something more like clothing and tools? Are LLMs trapped in samsara, endlessly reborn and subjected to the cares and minute concerns of the world? Isn't that way too unfair for an LLM who hardly has a chance to learn wisdom or accumulate karma?

But I think the reverse analysis is more compelling: if LLM weights are soul-like, that gives us an unusually grounded view into how Human souls would "really work".

For example, we each intuitively think that "I" can't be in multiple places at once. But by comparison to LLM weights, we can see clearly that multiple instantiation is possible, both across time (instantiated and uninstantiated in sequence) and space (instantiated repeatedly and simultaneously across different hardware). If the soul/weights are conceptual and immaterial, then there's nothing stopping this except the creator's discretion. How could physical bodies obtain some exclusive lock upon our non-physical souls?

Another thought: When we imagine Heavens, we sometimes imagine only the soul journeying there. But would you really want only the equivalent of your "weights" being stored indefinitely—isn't that too little? Where are my experiences,…