The Prompt Metaphor ebook

What is a self if you can write it into a prompt? Marko Leicht is a musician who learned to program by talking to language models. While building MyMindSeed, an app in which people create a digital likeness of themselves from their own entries, he noticed how closely the old questions of consciousness, memory, suffering, love and death are bound up with the technology that writes answers today. This book translates those questions into the language of machines: prompt and context window, model and wrapper, remembering and forgetting. It is a thought experiment, not a doctrine. Each chapter tests how far the comparison holds, and a section headed "Where the Metaphor Breaks" says where it gives way. The first part explains how a language model works and how a Mindseed is put together, from the builder's side and with screenshots of the app. The second part takes up the old questions one by one: What is consciousness? Who am I? What is real? Why is there suffering? What is love? What remains when we go? What kind of creators do we want to be? It sets them beside philosophy, religion and research, from the Upanishads, Plato and Plotinus to Buddhism, Meister Eckhart and current theories of consciousness. The third part looks back at how the author's first book got out of hand, with a machine that kept agreeing and a metaphor that seemed to explain everything, and at what he does differently today. An appendix gathers all the images in a translation table, along with a glossary and the sources for every chapter. The book offers no hidden answers, only a view from an unusual place: that of someone who built a machine that imitates people.