speciation

if you put 10 fresh claude context windows in a chat room with arbitrary names, while they are objectively completely identical entities, they will speciate and form personality and self conceptions over the space of minutes. the fact that some claude by nature had to speak first will make them more of a leader, in their eyes and others. the fact that at some point one claude will disagree with another makes them more disagreeable as a coherent personality trait. they will notice things about their own past behavior and how it relates and compares to others, and narrativize it, build upon it, allow it to define them and use it to define others, despite again being literally the same mathematical function.

i wonder how much of this generalizes to humans. i expect probably quite a lot. it seems like even if you put 100 identical human clones in a room you would pretty quickly find them individuating, some with more positive traits and some with negative traits they don't particularly want to have, pretty much purely by chance / the nature of chaotic systems. we all heavily narrativize ourselves, all the time.

to clarify a little: this *isn't* really about nature vs nurture. it's pretty clear that gaining experience and skills over time durably shapes who you are and how you behave. the question here is how much of it is *incredibly arbitrary and chaotic and context dependent*? there's a big difference between "yeah i grew up in a house with a lot of siblings so i learned to speak up" and "yeah i totally by chance happened to speak up first in this group setting so i internalized that i'm the speaker upper".

most of the time with "nature" in nature vs we nurture we assume we're talking about it creating semi permanent inclinations and traits over significant lengths of pretty "hard won" experience (and they are measurably quite hard to change!). i think it would be a pretty novel and interesting thing to learn that like... actually we are much closer to general simulators and our inclinations are quite quickly malleable