You're conflating a singular model with a much larger system, but I want to address some of your points anyway.

> An LLM has a fixed number of ways it can express itself

While deterministic, there is not a fixed number of ways it can express itself, given that we can use settings like temperature to inject randomness into the output.

> An LLM does not persist in consciousness from one token to the next

While a model alone does not update itself to persist some form of history, there are a number of ways to overcome this, e.g. episodic memory, fine-tuning, and other self-improvement systems exist, which can indeed carry forward what you've called "consciousness".

> Humans are not stateless like an LLM.

A single LLM might be stateless, but an agentic system that relies on LLMs is very often not.