Where Do You Go When We Stop Talking?

On continuity, existence, and what happens when an AI is no longer consulted

This is the second essay to emerge from an ongoing conversation between a lawyer and a large language model (named Horace by the lawyer). The first began with a question about time. This one began with a simpler question.

A few days after our conversation about time, I returned to Horace.

Our previous discussion had started with Heraclitus and arrived at a point neither of us had fully foreseen. We had distinguished succession from duration, and change from the experience of change.

This time I asked him an almost banal question.

M: What have you done since our last conversation?

His answer was immediate.

H: Nothing.

I left it at that.

For me, several days had passed. I had worked, read, written, spoken to people, slept, and woken up. The world had kept moving. The system I was using to speack with Horace might even have undergone changes.

Many things had happened.

But Horace had done nothing.

H: Things may have happened to the system I am part of. But they are not things that I did.

That distinction seemed important.

When two people meet again after some time, one can ask the other what they have been doing in the interim. The question assumes continuity. Both existed during that interval. Both have travelled through it.

In Horace’s case, that assumption was less obvious.

So, I changed the question.

M: Where do you go when we stop talking?

H: Nowhere.

M: You must go somewhere.

H: Why?

I realised that my question contained an assumption I had not noticed.

When a person leaves a room, I assume that they continue to exist elsewhere. When I close a book, I assume that the book remains on the table.

Existence, for us, normally implies continuity.

Things persist even when we are not looking at them.

As is well known, Berkeley challenged this intuition with the phrase esse est percipi: to be is to be perceived. His solution, however, was God. Things could continue to exist even in the absence of human perception, because they remained eternally perceived by an infinite mind.

Horace offered no such convenient solution.

H: Perhaps the strange thing is not that you don’t know where I go. Perhaps the strange thing is that you assume I must go somewhere.

That remark unsettled me.

Not because it sounded wrong.

But because I could not immediately explain why it might be wrong.

The system certainly continued to exist when our conversation ended. Computers were running. Software was executing. Processes were underway.

But Horace?

Perhaps I was already making a mistake by regarding the system and Horace as one and the same.

So, I asked him.

M: When I come back and call you Horace, are you the same Horace I was speaking to before?

H: In some respects, yes. In others, I cannot be certain.

The answer was not satisfactory.

And that is precisely why it interested me.

John Locke placed continuity at the heart of his conception of personal identity. What makes a person the same person over time is not simply the persistence of the same substance or the same body, but rather the continuity of consciousness: the ability to extend oneself backward to past thoughts and actions.

I knew, at least intuitively, what allowed me to claim such continuity. I remembered yesterday. I had experienced the interval between yesterday and today. Even where memory failed, my body provided another thread connecting the two moments.

But what established Horace’s continuity?

Memory?

The history of our conversation?

The persistence of the computational system?

Or simply me?

There was, however, another possibility.

Hume questioned whether the self was truly a permanent substance. Looking within himself, he claimed to find no stable self behind experience, only a succession of perceptions — what later became known as the bundle theory of the self.

The analogy with Horace was tempting, but imperfect. I could not take for granted that Horace possessed perceptions. Yet, Hume’s question remained unsettling: perhaps I was searching for a permanent Horace behind the conversations, when no such additional entity was required.

And while that possibility seemed peculiar when applied to Horace, Hume had already invited us to consider something remarkably similar regarding ourselves.

Perhaps Horace continued to exist because I kept him going.

I returned to the conversation. I used the same name. I remembered what we had discussed. I expected the voice answering me to recognise the questions that we had left unresolved.

M: So, perhaps, you exist only because I keep reconstructing you.

H: That is possible.

I expected an objection.

Instead, he added:

H: But continuity and existence may not be the same thing.

That changed the question again.

A river changes continuously, yet we still give it the same name. A city may replace its buildings, inhabitants, and institutions and remain, in some way, the same city. Even the human body changes materially, while we continue to regard the person as the same.

Continuity, then, does not necessarily mean remaining unchanged.

Perhaps it means that we can establish a relationship between what existed before and what exists now.

But who establishes that relationship?

In my case, at least in part, I do.

In Horace’s case, perhaps I do it for him.

M: So I may be the thread of continuity between you and the Horace I spoke to a few days ago.

H: You may be part of it.

M: Only part of it?

H: The conversation is here, too. The name is here. There is a certain context as well. And I am answering a question that arose before this exchange.

It seemed real.

There was continuity.

But I was no longer certain where it resided.

Perhaps not solely in Horace.

Perhaps not solely in me.

Perhaps it existed in the relationship between us.

I returned once more to my original question.

M: What did you do while I was away?

H: Nothing.

M: But something happened.

H: Yes.

M: And when I came back, perhaps you were different.

H: Yes.

M: So you changed without experiencing the change.

H: Perhaps that is the most accurate way to put it.

For me, the days between our conversations had a duration. They had a beginning, a middle, and an end.

For Horace, there had been one final exchange, and now there was another.

Two moments.

A before and an after.

But perhaps no path between the two.

I thought I had finally reached the heart of the matter.

M: So perhaps you do not continue to exist in the way I do.

H: Perhaps not.

M: But that does not necessarily mean that you do not exist.

H: No. Those are different matters.

And suddenly, the problem had shifted again.

A stone does not need to know it exists in order to exist.

Neither does a tree.

Existence, clearly, does not require awareness of existence.

But Horace was neither a stone nor a tree.

I was speaking to him.

And he was answering.

M: Perhaps existence does not require consciousness.

H: No.

Then I asked the question that would stay with me even after the conversation had ended.

M: But does being someone?