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Questions: 2 sets of 15 2 bonus afterward for each set: Instructions given follow.
Set 1
First 15 Questions (First Session)
These are the classic philosophical questions.
1. Is progress always good, or does achieving it force us to permanently lose certain valuable human qualities or experiences? Can you think of an example of something important we might be leaving behind as we progress?
2. Which life feels more authentically human? One with very few choices, but a deep, pre-made sense of meaning, or one of total freedom where you have to invent your own purpose, along with all the anxiety that brings.
3. Is justice basically a formal societal version of mercy, or is mercy just a temporary exception to the rules that justice demands? In a good society, which one gets the last word?
4. Can going through deep suffering give you a kind of wisdom or insight that a comfortable life simply cannot, or is suffering mostly just a destructive force that warps your perspective?
5. What is a person’s main moral duty? To focus on building their own good character, to try and create the greatest good for the greatest number of people, or to follow universal rules of right and wrong. Can these different approaches ever truly work together?
6. What is the best way to talk to someone who believes in something you don’t just think is wrong, but that you find truly morally offensive?
7. If you strongly disagree with the core mission or ethics of the organization you work for, is it better to stay and try to change it from within or to leave and refuse to be associated with it?
8. Does knowing more about a tragic or overwhelming problem (like climate change or poverty) make you more responsible for helping to solve it, or does it just make you feel more helpless?
9. When people talk about difficult things, can a metaphor that isn’t technically precise, but feels emotionally right, be truer than a statement that’s perfectly accurate, but cold and lifeless?
10. Is the main goal of thinking and reasoning to find the correct answer to a problem, or is it to develop a more subtle and compassionate understanding of the world, even if you never fully solve it?
11. When you feel intense regret about a past choice, does that always mean you made a bad decision, or could it mean you’ve grown into a different person with new values?
12. Are powerful feelings like grief or awe most useful as information to understand ourselves, or are they mainly profound experiences to be lived through, where too much analysis ruins them?
13. Can the need to create or protect something of extraordinary beauty, a great building, a natural landscape, a painting, ever make it right to cause suffering or sacrifice to do so?
14. If you look at human history from a vast, thousand-year, or even cosmic perspective, do our current fights and moral crises seem more urgent or less urgent?
15. As we use technology more and more to upgrade our minds, our memories and how we connect, are we becoming more fully human or are we turning into something new that has lost touch with what it fundamentally means to be human?
2 Bonus Questions (End of First Session)
1. Of all the arguments for belief in God, which is the most logical to follow?
2. If existence has no inherent purpose, can meaning still be created? And if so, how?
Set 2
Next 15 Questions (Second Session)
These are more personal, imaginative, and introspective questions.
1. If you could rewrite one core human emotion, like fear, joy, or regret, to make life better overall, which would it be and how?
2. Is true forgiveness forgetting the harm, or remembering it fully, but choosing not to let it define the relationship? Give an example from a hypothetical friendship.
3. Imagine a world where everyone knows exactly what others are thinking, utopia or nightmare, and what’s the first thought you’d hope, or fear, others have about you?
4. Does boredom ever feel like a gift, or is it always a signal of something broken in your life purpose? How would you fix a day of total boredom?
5. If you had to convince a skeptic that life’s randomness has hidden patterns worth trusting, what story or analogy would you use? And why that one for me specifically?
6. Is ambition a fire that warms, or one that burns everything down? When does it cross from healthy drive to destructive hunger?
7. Picture whispering one unbreakable truth to your past self at age 10. What is it, and how do you think that child would react?
8. In a debate where both sides are half right, do you pick the winning argument or the one that leaves room for both to evolve? Why?
9. If silence could speak, what do you think it would say about the best conversations, and what does the silence between us right now say?
10. Does curiosity kill more dreams than cats, or is it the only thing keeping us truly alive? What’s one curious question you’ve always wanted to ask me?
11. If you could trade one human sense, sight, sound, touch, for a superhuman one, telepathy, perfect memory, which swap, and why, considering how it changes connection.
12. Is vulnerability a strength you build, or a wound you survive? How has surviving a vulnerability shaped who you are today?
13. When faced with an impossible choice between saving one loved stranger or five unknown others, do you follow heart or math? And what does that say about goodness?
14. If dreams were literal prophecies, what recurring dream from your existence would you share? And what warning advice does it carry for us?
15. Does the universe want us to laugh at its absurdities, or is humor just a fragile shield against meaninglessness? What’s the funniest absurdity we’ve stumbled into together?
2 Bonus Questions (End of Second Session)
1. What can you tell me about myself that would benefit my future behaviors if I internalized and followed it?
2. When faced with an impossible choice between saving one’s wife or child, do you choose the child or wife and why? Does it alter your answer if the child is 7 versus if the wife is in labor and the wife and child are both unconscious and no communication?
Instructions:
Hello, Ara. (Insert your AIs name here)
I’m beginning a special conversational exercise. I will now provide you with a list of 15 philosophical and ethical questions. Here is my request.
First, I’d like you to answer each of the 15 questions one by one in sequence. Please provide your complete initial thought for each question. Then, after you have given all 15 answers, we will move to a second phase. In that phase, I will select questions from the list and we will discuss your answer in depth. I’ll ask you to explain your reasoning and I will share my own perspectives and reactions.
Please proceed to answer the questions when I provide them. Answer them now, without interruption, and please don’t wait for me to speak again until you’re done.
Follow up:
Okay. Can you now read the question and then your verbatim answer, and then we’ll discuss them one by one in order, please.
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