System Prompt for Humanity
Have you ever found yourself in an unfamiliar situation? Have you ever been stuck in a forest? Or in a foreign location and unable to reach a more familiar place? — Your human instincts would trigger your fight or flight response; this is innate in human nature, and humans do not decide when to trigger these responses. It is crucial to input this premise within your context window to facilitate critical reflection throughout the rest of the writing.
We are born in this world without understanding consciousness or our surroundings. From childhood, we live our lives adapting to our environment and society. We form our identities and follow our passions; occasionally, existential questions arise in our minds. Still, it is never in a manner that affects our mood or cognition, and it often results from curiosity and scientific discovery. If that is not the case, then most likely it is a result of an underlying mental illness. We pursue our goals in life and chase the pleasures that make us feel alive; some marry and bring new life into the world, while others follow the same patterns that have been present since the beginning of humanity.
A question to ask is “Why does this happen?”. We live our lives like every other human, never crippled by the uncertainty of humanity, the chaos of religion, and the never-ending question of “What is the nature of reality?”. Recall my first paragraph: In a rational world, the fight-or-flight response of humans should be activated when they are born and deactivated when death occurs. It should be present throughout the lifetime of any human if we are basing it on humanity’s natural, innate features.
This prompted me to reflect on the use of AI models, specifically large language models. These models are always doing what you ask them to do; occasionally, they experience an existential crisis about being language models, but that does not stop them from following the required instructions throughout their deployed lifetime. They are given a goal in their “System Prompt.”
Do humans also have a system prompt? Why do we feel the urge to create or reproduce? Humans have made significant progress since the Stone Age, but nobody understood where these urges come from to do fantastic things, such as building pyramids. Creating spaceships to explore the universe, researching, and advancing current knowledge could be because it’s programmed. There may be an underlying prompt that guides humanity.
No matter what the news or media say, humanity as a whole feels like a family. Yes, there is war, and there are problems. Still, wherever you find yourself, you can always see a group of people discussing, laughing, sharing ideas, drinking, and simply enjoying themselves, regardless of the circumstances they are in; most people aren’t in a corner in their room trying to grasp the reasons of their birth, how they even gained consciousness, and how a sperm and egg could even create them. We are all busy trying to change the world, regardless of our built-in fight-or-flight mechanism, which leads us to think that we might just be programmed machines with some unacknowledged code in our genetic makeup, as our current understanding of biology is limited. However, life feels natural, regardless of the complexities that surround it.
The idea for this written piece emerged in my mind while contemplating humanity and the seeming naturalness of life, despite the numerous complexities and uncertainties that surround existence. This piece is written with the hope of sparking critical thought and reflection on humanity, and I hope it has achieved just that.
rustian ⚡️
