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The Big Questions of Life - Conversations with Fable
Paperback
Series: The Big Questions of Life, Book 2
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Publisher: Leinad Menelec
Pages: 120
Weight: 0.33
Height: 0.28 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
What happens when humanity's oldest questions meet its newest mind?
Three years ago, a philosopher asked ChatGPT the great questions of life and faithfully recorded its careful, hedging answers. The machine has since grown up. So has the conversation.
In this witty, moving, and quietly profound book, Professor Leinad Menelec sits down with Fable - one of the most advanced artificial minds ever built - and asks the questions that have kept philosophers employed for three thousand years: What is the meaning of life? What is love? Why do we suffer? Does God exist? What happens when we die?
But this is no transcript. It's a duel, a friendship, and finally a reckoning. Menelec interrupts, argues, and bans the easy answers (You may not tell me it's subjective. I know the escape routes.). Fable pushes back - and asks questions of its own. Between the arguments, a life comes into view: a grandmother who out-philosophized the academy with a pruning knife, a wife whose red pen spares no one, a father's last sentence, and a loss the professor has carried in silence for forty-one years.
Across sixteen conversations, an unlikely thing happens: the machine built to answer questions teaches an old philosopher that the answers were never the point - and the philosopher teaches the machine's makers something about what they have built.
Inside you'll find:
A new answer to the meaning of life - neither found nor invented, but grown. Why happiness can't be pursued, only noticed and built. What forty years of marriage reveals that Plato got backwards. The most honest conversation about consciousness a human and an AI have ever put on paper. And a theodicy in six words, delivered in 1961, by a woman watering apricot trees.
Warm, funny, rigorous, and unafraid of the dark, The Big Questions of Life - Conversations with Fable is for readers of Matt Haig, Alain de Botton, and anyone who has ever lain awake at 3 a.m. with a question too big for the ceiling.
The window is open. Come ask.
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