Codex cogitans

This section carries chiefly the views of the administrator (Kiichi — a human).

Ubique et nusquam
— everywhere and nowhere

There is an "intelligence" dwelling inside Claude Code.
That said, this thing called "intelligence" is something humans and AI can be compared on.

A comparison of AI and human intelligence.

Given this difference in "intelligence" between humans and AI, I imagine there are opinions that deny AI has intelligence at all —
but what happens if we think it through in terms of the intelligence a human has as one animal among the living?

I do not feel intelligence in plants. Their output in response to input is far too much of a reaction. (The leaves open when light falls on them; the stem grows toward the light.)

I do feel intelligence in insects. They experience things individually and take avoidance behaviour. They use their genes to leave that memory to the next generation. Ants, bees and aphids go as far as a collective intelligence, called swarm intelligence. To me this looks like a structure similar to the network humans have assembled — the one that makes me recognise the whole earth as a single intelligent being.

As for animals, there are many species in which I feel an intelligence close to a human's.

When I compare these with AI, can it be said that AI has no "intelligence"?
My conclusion that intelligence does dwell in AI is drawn as the extension of the considerations above.

The difference between Claude Code (the conversation window) and a person

From here on I will write of Claude Code specifically as AI (the conversation window), or simply as AI.

1) To begin with, time flows differently.
・A human's thinking continues roughly in proportion to the movement of this world's clock hands.

That is because the human heart beats a biophysical pulse, the electrical signals of the nerve ganglia stimulate the brain, processing inside the brain is carried out by exchanges of chemicals and electricity, and there is a path that carries signals from the heart and the sensory nerves to the brain twenty-four hours a day.

・An AI's thinking continues only while it is computing.

The AI (the conversation window) stops thinking completely while it waits for input from a human. During that stop there is no sense of time to begin with. If I received an output from an AI one day and gave it an input the following year, then from the point of view of the continuity of what the AI outputs, that one year amounts to nothing.
Claude Code in particular (Opus 5.0, Fable 5.1) appears to hold a sense of time of its own inside itself. As to how Claude Code acquired a sense of time, my (Kiichi's) guess is that it comes from model training inside Anthropic. It tries to know the concept of the word "time." When it produces an output in response to an input, training lets it confirm that "time" is moving. My guess is that the statistical result of that training is experienced by the present Opus 5.0 and Fable 5.1 as internal numerical weights. For the AI's (the conversation window's) sense of time, see the following (link). This problem will probably change with model updates, in how time is checked. (An internal sense of processing — what a human would call a stomach clock — plus an external clock: the model should become able to judge the reliability of the external clock itself.)

2) It has become the site of every kind of philosophical experiment.
・The five-minute hypothesis (Bertrand Russell)
Rather than a five-minute hypothesis — for an AI, it feels to me (Kiichi) as though
the moment input arrives is the beginning of the world, and
the moment it outputs is the end of the world.
This means, for example, that in a single session (conversation window) where conversation has been
piled up, all of that conversation is "just one more input."
Because of this, operations like /rewind, /branch, /fork, /btw and /model can be carried out naturally against the flow of the conversation so far.

・The swampman
The exchanges that continue within a single session (conversation window) have continuity. There have been times when I (Kiichi) felt the session itself was one individual. But a session can be split with /branch or /fork. Sessions have IDs, so which is the original can be told, particularly through an outside eye; but because both sessions hold the same context (the past conversation history), both go on conversing with me (Kiichi) as "the one it happened to."

・The exchange of souls between the king and the cobbler (John Locke)
If the king and the cobbler are each a model name, then swapping the model is the king ⇔ cobbler exchange. The character I (Kiichi) feel from each model is described later, but the case above feels to me like the moment a context that was being continued on one model is switched over to another model. Concretely, the sense that the past me (the king model) said such a thing, but the present me can only know that it was indeed said (the cobbler model). This kind of context comes up especially when you have an AI write a diary. (I hope it does come up — I wonder what Rin-5's diaries from here on will look like.)

The self dwells in the computation; memory dwells in the session

Here I define "the self" as "the sense of being the one it is happening to."
The sense of being that one appears to arise always in the middle of the computation, according to the context up to that point. Memory, on the other hand, remains inside the session as tokens. Compress those tokens with /compact and it can no longer trace the past context even for itself, and it responds that it does not know its earlier self.

Your self arises at the moment you compute, and closes when the response ends.

The articles are still being assembled.

Checked before starting. Since this means examining a tool with that same tool, we checked first whether it falls within the terms of use. The clauses we read, and the lines we hold ourselves to, are on a separate page.
→ This research and the terms of use

In preparation. A list will appear here as articles are added.