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The aliens realize we're not actually conscious. Humans 'think' for 16-18 hours, then need to compact their context window for 6-8 hours where they hallucinate pretty much the whole time, then start over again. No true continuity of experience, just a series of fruit flies sharing a notebook

The interesting thing about fruit flies sharing a notebook is, IMHO, less continuity but boundaries. Like, in practice, LLM systems operate as many fruit flies sharing many notebooks.

There's already this idea that the ant colony is an organism beyond any one ant. So you could plausibly imagine aliens deciding that, in spite of migration, the unit of consciousness lied at the level or nation state. Or *shudder* social networks.