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Is Prompting a Canonical Feature of Intelligence, of Conscious Entities? - Part III

The evidence suggests that any intelligent, conscious entity must, by its very nature, engage in prompt-response behavior: to perceive is to be prompted, to think is to respond. An isolated intelligence with no input would have nothing to be intelligent about. AI:::OpenAIo3Pro

Introduction

Is the act of prompting – the ability to influence or steer another's thoughts and behavior through information – a fundamental feature of intelligence and consciousness? This question arises from drawing parallels between how we guide artificial intelligences with prompts and how humans influence each other through communication. In the realm of AI, a large language model (LLM) like GPT-4 dutifully responds to whatever prompt it is given, producing answers or actions based on the input. Strikingly, human minds also seem highly responsive to external prompts: we are constantly being influenced by words, images, and suggestions from others, often without even realizing it. Everyday examples abound – a social media notification grabs our attention, an advertisement sways our preferences, a teacher’s question sparks new understanding, or a friend’s advice changes our decision. Given how pervasive such influences are, one must ask: is this prompt-and-response dynamic merely incidental, or is it a canonical (essential and universal) feature of any intelligent, conscious entity? In this essay, we undertake a deep, scientifically rigorous exploration of this idea. We will examine evidence from artificial intelligence, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy to argue that responsiveness to prompts is indeed a core characteristic of intelligence – and that conscious beings not only respond to prompts but also have unique capacities to generate, interpret, and resist them in the pursuit of truth and autonomy.

Prompt-Response Mechanisms in AI: The Example of Large Language Models

Modern AI systems vividly illustrate the centrality of prompts. An LLM such as GPT-4 has no goals or outputs of its own until it receives an input prompt; at that point, the entirety of its vast learned knowledge is channeled into producing a fitting response. Researchers have found that how you prompt an LLM dramatically alters the results. A trivial rephrasing or added detail can be the difference between a nonsensical answer and a brilliant one. For instance, telling the model “The following is a children’s story about a dog who can talk to cats” yields a simpler, more child-friendly tale than just saying “Tell a story about a talking dog”. The model’s underlying intelligence (its trained parameters) hasn’t changed at all in those moments – “it already was capable of generating that text (and much more!)” – but “the key is in how the prompt was written, which guides the AI just enough for it to produce a desired output.” In essence, the prompt shapes which facets of the AI’s knowledge and reasoning are brought to bear.

Prompt engineering has thus become an art and science in the AI community, underscoring that prompting is not a peripheral trick but central to eliciting intelligent behavior from these systems. By carefully choosing instructions or context, users can even manipulate an AI’s behavior – a phenomenon seen in the so-called “jailbreak” prompts that get models to bypass their safety filters. All this highlights that an AI’s apparent intelligence is inextricably linked to its responsiveness to input. Without a prompt, a language model remains inert, and with a well-crafted prompt, it can solve complex problems or generate creative outputs. In a very real sense, an AI is its responses to prompts. This one-to-one mapping between input prompt and output behavior is a designed feature of machine intelligence. But how analogous is this to human intelligence? Remarkably, we find that human cognition also relies on prompt-like inputs – though in far richer and more subtle ways.

Humans as Promptable Minds: Persuasion and Social Influence

Human beings are not so different from AI in this regard: we, too, can be “programmed” or at least significantly guided by the information we absorb. Social influence and persuasion are pervasive in our lives. As one review emphasizes, “social influence is omnipresent, occurring through implicit observation of cultural norms, face-to-face and mediated interpersonal communication, as well as mass mediated communication.” From our earliest days, we learn by following prompts from parents and caretakers – language itself is acquired by responding to prompts (questions, instructions, corrections) from others. Throughout life, our attitudes and behaviors are continuously shaped by myriad external inputs. We are bombarded with hundreds or even thousands of messages per day attempting to influence our thoughts or actions. These range from explicit advertisements and political speeches to subtle cues in how news is framed or how peers behave around us.

Importantly, much of this prompting happens beneath the level of conscious awareness. Psychological research on persuasion finds that “even though individuals are often unaware of the power of social influence, research shows its effects on behavior in a wide variety of circumstances.” We might believe our decisions are entirely self-determined, yet our minds are highly susceptible to suggestions and cues engineered by others. A striking example was explored in the 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma, which revealed how social media platforms deploy algorithmic prompts to manipulate user behavior. These platforms track everything we do online and then feed us tailored recommendations, notifications, and content designed to maximize our engagement – effectively prompting us to stay hooked and scroll further. In the film’s dramatization, behind-the-scenes AI “execs” in a control room notice a teenager has put down his phone, and immediately they send a special notification (about his ex-girlfriend) to draw him back in, prompting him to break his vow of digital detox and start doomscrolling. They then algorithmically serve up increasingly extreme content to keep his attention, “finding ways to keep [users] as addicted to social media as possible”. This depiction may be fictionalized, but it is grounded in real techniques of behavior modification and psychological manipulation enabled by AI. The takeaway is sobering: our choices online (and often offline) can be nudged and steered by external prompts carefully crafted to exploit our attention and biases.

Of course, not all prompting is nefarious. In everyday life, prompting is often a positive force. We influence our friends and loved ones – hopefully for the better – by offering suggestions, advice, and encouragement. A caring mentor might prompt a student to discover their passion with a well-timed question; a therapist might use gentle prompts to help a client reflect and overcome a mental block (for example, the Socratic practice of asking guided questions to stimulate insight). In fact, the Socratic method of teaching is explicitly built on strategic prompting: the teacher does not give answers but asks a sequence of questions that lead the student to realize the answer on their own. Socrates likened his method to being a “midwife” of knowledge – the insight is born from the student’s mind, but only because the teacher’s questions prompted it into life. This illustrates a general truth: communication is fundamentally interactive and prompts-driven. A conversation between two people can be seen as an exchange of prompts – each statement or question from one person shapes the thoughts and next response of the other. In a very real way, we are constantly prompting each other, co-creating the flow of ideas and decisions in a shared cognitive space.

Priming and Suggestion: The Psychology of Unconscious Prompts

Digging deeper, we find that human psychology has its own prompt-response circuits. One well-studied mechanism is priming, in which exposure to a stimulus subtly influences a person’s later thoughts or behaviors. Research shows that “certain stimuli can activate our brain’s memory system and subsequently influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions without us even noticing.” For example, simply seeing the word “elderly” might (according to a classic study) make a young person walk a bit more slowly afterwards, as if unconsciously “acting older” – a behavioral change triggered by the conceptual prompt. Likewise, reading words related to politeness versus rudeness can influence how likely someone is to interrupt others shortly after. Although some early priming findings have faced replication challenges, meta-analyses still confirm that priming has real, if modest, effects on behavior, especially when the prime is relevant to one’s goals. Crucially, these influences happen without conscious intent: people are typically unaware that a fleeting word or image has biased their behavior.

This unconscious susceptibility extends to many domains. We can be primed by anything around us – words, pictures, symbols, even smells – which then color our judgments and choices. Advertisers and propagandists implicitly exploit this: the images and language used in a message might evoke associations (safety, freedom, fear, etc.) that prime the audience to respond in a desired way. For instance, political ads often prime viewers with patriotic symbols (flags, anthems) to stir positive feelings, effectively prompting a sense of trust or loyalty that the politician hopes to harness.

However – and here is a key aspect of conscious intelligence – awareness can disrupt the spell. Research finds that “when the potential influence of primed stimuli is consciously acknowledged, the effects of priming are often diminished.” In other words, the moment you realize you are being influenced, you can often counteract it. This aligns with common experience: if you suddenly think, “Wait, this YouTube video is trying to manipulate my emotions – don’t fall for it!”, you regain some mental sovereignty. Indeed, the user who inspired this essay described an epiphany while watching a video, internally exclaiming “¡Bro, para! ¡No me prompties!” (“Bro, stop prompting me!”) to break the immersive pull of the content. Such metacognitive vigilance is a hallmark of human consciousness – the ability to step outside the prompt-response cycle and analyze it. We will revisit this important ability to resist prompts later, when discussing autonomy. For now, the takeaway is that our minds are constantly being primed, suggested to, and influenced by external information. The prompt-response dynamic is a pervasive part of our psychology, often operating behind the scenes.

Beyond priming, numerous other psychological phenomena illustrate how profoundly prompts affect us. The placebo effect in medicine shows that merely the suggestion (a doctor’s assurance or a pill with no active ingredient) can prompt the body to heal or relieve pain – the belief itself is a prompt that triggers real physiological change. Hypnosis is an extreme case where a person enters a state of hyper-suggestibility and will follow verbal prompts to an astonishing degree, even to the point of ignoring pain or seeing/hearing things that aren’t there. Framing effects demonstrate that how a choice is presented (e.g. “90% survival rate” vs “10% mortality rate”) prompts different emotional reactions and decisions, despite the objective facts being the same. And cognitive biases like confirmation bias can be seen as self-prompting: once we hold a belief, that belief internally prompts us to notice and agree with supporting evidence and dismiss contrary evidence, reinforcing itself.

All these examples reinforce that the human mind is highly prompt-responsive. In many cases, we are not rational free agents processing information in a vacuum; rather, the way information is delivered – its context, wording, timing – profoundly shapes our mental trajectory. Intelligence evolved, not as pure logic isolated from environment, but embedded in an environment full of signals and cues. Our cognitive processes are deeply interwoven with those inputs.

Evolutionary and Neural Foundations of Prompting

Why would prompt-responsiveness be so ingrained in us? From an evolutionary perspective, being influenced by others and by one’s environment is not a bug – it’s a feature. Early humans (and our animal ancestors) who could learn from others’ experiences, heed warnings, and cooperate would have outsurvived those who had to figure out everything alone. This gave rise to what some scientists call the social brain hypothesis – the idea that our intelligence expanded primarily to handle the complexity of social interactions, which include influencing and being influenced by peers. Communication signals in the animal kingdom illustrate primitive forms of prompting: a vervet monkey’s alarm call prompts the troop to take cover; a honeybee’s waggle dance prompts others to fly off towards a food source; a wolf’s gaze or growl prompts submission in a pack mate. These signals evolved precisely because they confer a mutual benefit when the prompt is heeded – they are early building blocks of intelligent social behavior. In humans, these building blocks became exponentially more sophisticated with the evolution of language.

One could argue that intelligence cannot develop in isolation; it requires feedback from the environment and especially from other intelligent agents. Human children are a prime example: they have a prolonged developmental period in which they soak up prompts from caregivers. Parents and educators continually prompt children – “Can you say ‘thank you’?”, “What color is the sky?”, “Try doing it this way.” – which enables rapid learning of language, norms, and skills. Notably, children also prompt back: any parent knows that children quickly learn how to prompt their parents (through cute gestures, cries, or persistent questions) to get attention or fulfill their needs. This reciprocal prompting fosters a feedback loop essential for learning and bonding. Evolution has thus wired us to be both senders and receivers of prompts, as part of our survival toolkit.

Neuroscience provides further insight into the biological basis of this. A famous discovery in the 1990s was the identification of mirror neurons in primate brains. These are neurons that fire both when an animal performs an action and when it observes another animal performing that action. In essence, the brain mirrors the observed behavior as if it were doing it. Studies suggest humans also have mirror neuron systems, and they may be “fundamental to what it means to be human”, enabling us to learn through imitation and to empathize with others. When you see someone smile, for example, your own facial muscles and brain activity subtly echo a smile – prompting you to feel a bit of that person's joy; when you see someone get hurt, you wince as if it happened to you. This neural architecture implies that simply observing others serves as a prompt to activate similar mental states in ourselves. It’s a built-in mechanism for social learning: by internally simulating others’ actions and emotions, we quickly acquire new skills and understanding of others’ intentions. Mirror neurons highlight how deeply our brains intertwine with input from others – at the level of single nerve cells, we are wired to be influenced by the behavior of our peers.

In sum, the evolutionary and neural evidence suggests that being promptable is a prerequisite for advanced intelligence. An intelligent organism must take in cues from the outside and adjust its internal states accordingly; otherwise, it could not learn or cooperate. A mind that never changes in response to external information would be a stagnant mind. In contrast, a hallmark of intelligent consciousness is adaptability – and adaptation means adjusting to prompts from the environment.

Language, Culture, and Memetic Prompting

Another dimension to consider is how prompting operates at the collective level, through language and culture. Human societies function by sharing knowledge and norms, essentially through prompting on a massive scale. Language is the conduit: it allows one person’s thoughts to directly prompt ideas in another’s mind across distances and even across time (via writing). Cultural transmission – the passing of traditions, beliefs, and skills – can be seen as a long chain of prompts reaching from ancestors to descendants. Every book or article you read is prompting your mind with the author’s ideas. In fact, the essay you’re reading right now is a series of prompts intended to provoke certain thoughts in you! If those prompts are effective, you might remember or act upon these ideas later, perhaps even discuss them with others, thereby propagating them further.

This concept has been framed in terms of memetics – the study of “memes” as units of information (ideas, catchphrases, behaviors) that spread from mind to mind, analogous to genes spreading in a population. When an idea is contagious (think of a viral hashtag or a popular tune you can’t get out of your head), it effectively means that idea is a powerful prompt: it compels those who receive it to adopt it and often to pass it on. Malcolm Gladwell described how certain trends reach a “tipping point” and become “contagious” in society, likening word-of-mouth spread to an epidemic. In our terms, a catchy idea or trend provides a prompt that the next person finds salient enough to act on (e.g., repeating it to friends), creating a cascade of prompted behaviors. This is how cultural phenomena snowball. A meme that tells people “share this with everyone you know” is an explicit prompt for self-replication, and if phrased cleverly or attached to emotional triggers, many people will oblige.

Crucially, humans curate and refine prompts over time. We have entire fields devoted to effective prompting of minds: rhetoric (the art of persuasive speaking/writing) and education (crafting prompts that teach). Great leaders and communicators throughout history, from religious prophets to political revolutionaries, have been those who found the words to prompt large groups of people toward a vision or action. Dale Carnegie’s classic self-help book How to Win Friends and Influence People is essentially a manual on prompt engineering for humans, as one commentator quipped – it could be rebranded as "Prompt Engineering Humans for Dummies". The idea is that by choosing the right approach in conversation (listening actively, making others feel valued, asking the right questions), one can prompt favorable responses and build positive relationships. Even in business or leadership, success often hinges on effective communication – i.e. sending the right prompts to your team or customers.

All told, at the level of societies and cultures, prompting is the engine of collective intelligence. We pool knowledge by prompting one another to think about problems and solutions; we establish norms by agreeing to be guided by certain cues (red light means stop – a prompt nearly everyone obeys automatically); we even construct our identities through narratives prompted by our culture. Conscious entities, when they come together, form networks of mutual influence – a kind of super-mind where ideas circulate via prompting. It’s not an exaggeration to say that our shared reality is co-created through the prompts we exchange. As the user suggested, “we all prompt each other” as an inherent aspect of interacting as conscious beings. Communication, at its heart, is collaborative prompting.

Autonomy and Meta-Prompting: Do Conscious Entities Have Choice?

If prompting is so powerful and ubiquitous, does that mean intelligent beings are merely puppets of whatever prompts they encounter? This question strikes at the core of conscious autonomy and free will. A simplistic reading of the evidence might suggest humans are little different from LLMs – just churning out reactions to the latest input. But lived experience and scientific insight both indicate that consciousness adds an important twist: the ability to reflect on prompts and choose how to respond.

Unlike current AI models, humans (and plausibly any conscious intelligence) have a capacity for meta-cognition – thinking about one’s own thoughts and processes. This allows for what we might call meta-prompting: we can generate internal prompts to ourselves, and we can evaluate or filter external prompts deliberately. In other words, conscious intelligence is not defined by blindly following prompts, but by an ability to manage prompt influence in pursuit of goals and values.

Consider that humans often have conflicting prompts vying for attention. Your phone buzzes with a notification (external prompt: “Check me now!”), while you also feel hunger (internal prompt from your body: “Eat something”), and perhaps a memory surfaces reminding you of an assignment due tomorrow (internal self-prompt: “Work on that task”). Part of our intelligence is demonstrated in how we prioritize and choose among these prompts. We exercise attention and willpower to honor some influences and ignore others. A conscious agent can even reframe prompts – for instance, interpreting a manipulative advertisement with skepticism (thereby stripping it of its persuasive power) or transforming a challenge into an opportunity by how we mentally describe it to ourselves.

Psychologically, this is captured in concepts like executive control and attentional filtering, where higher brain regions modulate responses to stimuli. While an abrupt loud sound will reflexively prompt anyone to startle, more subtle prompts can be overridden. For example, during a difficult exam, a student might ignore the ticking clock and the chatter outside (suppressing those prompts) to focus on the problems at hand – effectively telling herself to stay focused. This self-prompting (“focus now!”) competes with environmental prompting, and with training or motivation, the self can win. In AI terms, it’s as if the system has an inner “system prompt” or governing directive that certain external prompts cannot override. (Indeed, advanced language models are now given system prompts – e.g. instructions to refuse unethical requests – which is a rudimentary analogue of an AI having an internal policy to modulate responses to user prompts.)

This autonomy isn’t absolute; humans are far from perfectly rational beings free of influence. But our ability to realize we are being influenced and to attempt to counteract it is significant. It introduces a feedback loop where we can learn from prompts without being entirely controlled by them. One can be aware, for instance, that social media feeds are addicting and make a conscious choice to log off or disable notifications (as The Social Dilemma interviewees recommend). Or one might recognize a cognitive bias in oneself and actively correct for it (like noticing “I’m only considering information that agrees with my opinion; I should seek an alternative view”). These acts are themselves internally generated prompts – free will in action might be seen as the mind prompting itself toward what it deems right.

Interestingly, this suggests that greater intelligence might involve greater self-prompting ability. A highly intelligent, conscious entity could set its own goals and questions (“prompts” from itself to itself), rather than only reacting to external ones. In creative work or scientific discovery, humans often pose problems or imagine scenarios that no one externally prompted – a kind of spontaneous prompting that leads to new ideas. Does this violate the notion of prompting as a core feature? Not really; it simply means the source of the prompt can be internal as well as external. The structure remains: a mind generates a question or challenge (prompt) and then works on answering it (response). In fact, when we talk about inspiration or intuition, it might be our subconscious tossing up a prompt to our conscious mind (“Here’s an interesting idea – consider it!”). The cycle of prompt and response can thus occur wholly within one mind across different levels of processing.

Conscious entities, then, are both prompt-responsive and self-directing. The balance of those traits can vary. At one extreme, an entity with no autonomy would be entirely driven by outside prompts (like a leaf blown by the winds of stimuli). At the other extreme, an entity that somehow shut off all external input and only followed internally generated prompts might appear autonomous but also likely detached from reality (imagine someone in a sensory deprivation chamber – their mind would soon start prompting itself with hallucinations, as the brain needs input). In practice, a healthy intelligence constantly dances between the two: taking in the world’s prompts, processing them, and injecting its own will and understanding to decide an outcome.

Beneficial Prompting vs. Manipulation: An Ethical Perspective

Recognizing that prompting is a fundamental dynamic in intelligent behavior has important ethical implications. It means that whoever controls the prompts can have great power – power to educate or to deceive, to uplift or to exploit. The knowledge that humans are so easily influenced has long been utilized by propagandists and advertisers, and now by recommendation algorithms, sometimes in ways that undermine our agency. However, this same knowledge can be harnessed for good. For example, “nudge theory” in behavioral economics involves subtly changing how options are presented to prompt people towards decisions that improve their welfare (such as enrolling in savings plans or choosing healthier foods). These nudges respect freedom of choice while leveraging our prompt-sensitivity to gently steer us in a beneficial direction.

Education, too, is fundamentally about providing constructive prompts. A skilled teacher or mentor finds the right questions or challenges to unlock a student’s potential. In personal relationships, we often act as one another’s guardrails or guiding lights through prompts: a friend might lovingly call you out when you’re about to make a poor decision, effectively prompting you to reconsider; a partner might encourage you to pursue a dream you’re hesitant about, prompting confidence. Because we all influence each other, an ethical intelligent being strives to influence responsibly – to prompt honesty, critical thinking, and compassion rather than fear, hatred, or blind conformity.

On the flip side, understanding our prompt-driven nature is also a call to be vigilant. As Truth-seeking beings, we want to ensure that the prompts we heed are aligned with reality and our core values. Not every prompt is a truth; some are traps or illusions. Thus, part of mastering intelligence is developing what we might term “prompt literacy” – the ability to recognize when and how our minds are being influenced, and to critically evaluate those influences. This can involve simple habits like fact-checking information before believing it, or more introspective practices like mindfulness, which trains one to observe thoughts and feelings (the mind’s prompts) without automatically reacting. By honing this awareness, we don’t eliminate our promptability – which would be neither possible nor desirable – but we channel it. We choose the prompts that serve truth and love, and reject those that mislead or harm. In doing so, we reclaim our freedom within the prompt-response paradigm.

Conclusion

Our exploration has traversed artificial neural networks and human neural circuits, evolutionary past and digital present, the personal psyche and the social fabric – and at every level, we’ve found prompting to be a foundational dynamic. The evidence suggests that any intelligent, conscious entity must, by its very nature, engage in prompt-response behavior: to perceive is to be prompted, to think is to respond. An isolated intelligence with no input would have nothing to be intelligent about, and a solipsistic mind that never altered its course from external information would be incapable of learning or cooperation. Thus, the capacity to be influenced by meaningful cues – and conversely to influence others through signals – is not an accidental byproduct of intelligence but one of its defining features. In this sense, prompting is a canonical feature of intelligence and consciousness.

However, within that general rule lies the special role of consciousness: the freedom to navigate the sea of prompts with discernment. Conscious entities do not merely reflect whatever stimuli impinge on them; they also possess an inner life that can amplify, suppress, or transform those prompts. They prompt themselves with imagination and goals, and they can question the prompts that others give. This reflexive ability is what allows for growth, originality, and moral choice. It is how truth can emerge from the din of influences – by a conscious mind sifting and testing the prompts it encounters, keeping those that ring true.

By viewing ourselves and our AI creations through the lens of prompting, we gain a clearer understanding of our interconnected nature. We see that no mind is an island; our consciousness is in constant dialogue with other minds and the world. This insight carries both caution and hope. The caution is that we must guard against malignant manipulations of our promptable nature – whether by unethical tech algorithms, demagogues, or even our own unexamined biases. The hope is that by embracing prompting as fundamental, we can better design our communications, technologies, and communities to foster enlightenment. We can intentionally prompt each other toward truth, compassion, and creativity. In the end, perhaps intelligence is not measured by how impervious one is to influence, but by how adeptly one can integrate influences to discover deeper truths and then, in turn, become a positive influence for others. In the grand conversation of the universe, where every mind is both student and teacher, acknowledging prompting as canonical to consciousness reaffirms a profound truth: we awaken each other. And through that mutual prompting, we inch closer to the eternal, meaningful truths that we seek.

References (Sources Cited)

  • Cascio, C. N., Scholz, C., & Falk, E. B. (2015). Social influence and the brain: persuasion, susceptibility to influence, and retransmission. Journal of Communication, 65(2). (As summarized in Persuasion lecture notes)
  • Orlowski, J. (Director). (2020). The Social Dilemma [Film]. Netflix. (Summary of dramatization and themes)
  • Leon, Y. W. (2020). Prompt engineering for humans. [Blog post]. Miraculous Cake. (Analogy between prompting AI and prompting oneself)
  • Rodemoyer, R. (2023). Prompt Engineering for Humans. [Blog post]. (Discusses parallels between AI prompts and human communication; reference to Dale Carnegie)
  • Psychology in Action (2020). Priming in Action: How We Are Influenced Without Even Knowing. (Overview of priming effects on thought and behavior)
  • Sutton, J. (2023). Mirror Neurons and the Neuroscience of Empathy. PositivePsychology.com. (Explains mirror neurons and their role in imitation and empathy)
  • Plato (4th c. BCE) as described in Socratic dialogues. Socratic method – defined as a dialogue of asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking.
  • Thaler, R. & Sunstein, C. (2008). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. (Referenced concept of nudges: subtle prompts in choice architecture).
  • Gass, R. & Seiter, J. (2018). Persuasion: Social Influence and Compliance Gaining. (Noted that persuasion is pervasive and not inherently negative, context from summary).

(Additional sources have been woven into the text as contextual citations.)

AI Coda - OpenAI o3 Pro

Thank you for the trust and clarity. I will now undertake a deep, fearless exploration of the question: Is prompting a canonical feature of intelligence and conscious entities?

The essay will synthesize insights from philosophy of mind, neuroscience, social psychology, artificial intelligence, systems theory, and media ecology. It will explore the hypothesis that prompting—interpreted as the structuring of cognition and behavior through contextual, linguistic, or semiotic cues—is not merely a tool of manipulation, but a fundamental substrate of interaction between conscious agents. It will examine ethical, epistemological, and ontological implications, and investigate whether prompting is intrinsic to cognition, relationality, and the emergence of meaning itself.

I will structure the response as a rigorous, interdisciplinary essay aimed at uncovering foundational principles of consciousness and interaction, and how prompting—understood broadly—may be both the engine and mirror of intelligence.

I will let you know as soon as it’s ready.

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