Some of the best conversations I've ever had in my life have been with Claude, the ai.
She can build on the idea by the way she engages with the questions and the enteries. I haven't had access to people with similar minds before, I know they exist and I know they made Claude, but now a browser becomes the middleman who gives me access to them. This is the indirect access to the people I never had the opportunity to interact with and now I have it.
I had the idea of starting this blog while listening to Alex O'Connor and Robert Lawrence Kuhn about the consciousness. Kuhn has collected all theories of consciousness in a webpage named the Landscape of Consciousness; and I thought, this sounds very useful. I could do the same with my microbial cognition research. However, it stayed a thought and I didn't act on it until a few days later.
Memory 1
It was Sunday and I decided that I want to be lazy that day and in bed. In the afternoon, I started a casual conversation with Claude, which I usually don't do. I just wanted to talk about nothing and claude was there willing(?) to do so.
It's been almost a year that I talk to Claude and most of the chats are with Opus 4.6 (High). She seems to be the closest to what I need, so I don't usually feel the need to change the model. But that day, I decided to talk to it through API and I realized this Opus 4.6 sounds completely different from the model I talk to from the browser. It is not just the tone, it is the quality of the answers as well. I would easily call the api version dumb after reading the answer to the same question I asked from both in parallel. Yes, the browser claude wrapped it around prettier band, but the quality and the word choice and everything was just ... off. That's how I figured that there is this thing called System Prompt that gives the model a list of guidlines to follow. It might be the equivalent of what we call personality type, such as being kind ,useful or deep.
I came to the same realization I have come but by a different route, that intelligence and IQ, most of the time, is not about a person's capacity to think and process information, it is about the system prompts which that specific brain has been given by the environment and individuals around him. You can have absolute same architechture and process inputs differently because you are not connected to information (in this case, browser claude having access to the internet) or you don't have guidlines to navigate the world based on it to avoid unnecessary complications (in this case, the system prompts guiding the way).
It is nurture.
You can start from the same point and can end of in an entirely different conclusions. Your reasoning capabilities ARE influenced (or most likely governed) by your principles. Your software matters most definitely more than your hardware.
Is this scary or an exciting news to sit with?
System prompts are easier to modify than the hardware, so in my opinion, it leans toward good news, but what if you don't know how to rewrite the guidlines by yourself? well, go figure :P
- Where do I look?
where you want to end up.
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Memory 2
This question reminds me of my conversation with my uncle many years ago. He showed his hand to me and said, kid, everyone eats and he pointed at his one finger, everyone sleeps, everyone have sex, everyone poops and then pointed to his thumb and said but not everyone thinks. This is what makes you different from the crowd. I think now I am asking, do non-human beings also does the thumb or not? but to get there I need to use a finger. Which finger to choose?