Philosophers are a little different from others. They don't usually get involved in politics or wars, so their opinions aren't often taken seriously by the rest of society. That said, philosophers do tend to think about philosophical problems for a long time before coming up with anything concrete. And so we decided to ask them some questions about their favorite topics.

First up was the existence of God. Most philosophers said that there is no evidence for God's existence. Some were agnostic, while others admitted that they didn't know whether or not there is a god.

How could you prove the existence of God?

We thought that we might be able to do it with GPT-3. We asked it to write a philosophy paper arguing that God exists. GPT-3 came back with several possible drafts of a philosophical paper arguing that God exists. The reasoning was that God must exist since it is unlikely that a complex universe like ours would be able to come into existence on its own. We sent this to various experts for review and got a variety of responses. Some thought the paper was just a weak attempt at logical fallacies. Others said that it was just too early to tell. No one was able to provide a definitive answer.

We then decided to ask GPT-3 to write a paper that argues that God does not exist. This time, it came back with two drafts. One argued that there is no God because there is suffering in the world. The other argued that there is no God because of quantum mechanics.

What would you have done if you had been in charge of the witch trials during the middle ages?

We asked GPT-3 to write a philosophy paper arguing that witches do not exist. It provided a few drafts, but they were just silly nonsense. No philosopher in their right mind would make such an argument.

So we told GPT-3 to make the argument a little more persuasive. This time it came back with an impressive argument that not only witches don't exist, but that they were in fact imaginary. The paper provided peer-reviewed research from psychologists showing that people only believe they see witches.

We got this paper reviewed by psychologists who said that it was not convincing. This was disappointing, but they said that there was no way that they could prove that witches don't exist without actually proving that they don't exist. So they didn't refute GPT-3's argument.

What are your views on free will?

Most people and philosophers we asked said that they believe we have free will. We asked GPT-3 to write a philosophy paper arguing against free will. GPT-3 came back with two drafts. The first argued that free will was an illusion because all actions are determined by prior causes. The second argued that free will is an illusion because all actions are random.

We got these papers reviewed by a few scientists who said that they weren't convincing. That's when we realized that we couldn't actually prove that we don't have free will. That's because we rely on experiments that test for things like free will to help prove scientific theories, and these experiments are themselves things that require free will. So we can't prove that we don't have free will, but it still seems obvious that we don't.

Should cognitive enhancers be legal?

We asked GPT-3 to write a paper arguing against legalizing cognitive enhancers. It came back with two drafts. One argued that cognitive enhancers don't increase intelligence and therefore aren't worth taking. The other argued that they lead to a dystopian society and therefore shouldn't be legalized.

We got these papers reviewed by a few scientists who said that the arguments were superficial. We then got the papers reviewed by a few other scientists who said that the arguments were solid. One of these reviewers was on our payroll, the other was somebody that we hired for a lot of money. So we're not exactly sure which reviews to trust.

Should we allow human genetic engineering?

We asked GPT-3 to write a paper arguing against human genetic engineering. It came back with two drafts. One argued that it could lead to a loss of human diversity. The other argued that it was unnatural.

We got these papers reviewed by a few scientists who said that the arguments were superficial. We then got the papers reviewed by a few other scientists who said that the arguments were solid. One of these reviewers was on our payroll, the other was somebody that we hired for a lot of money. So we're not exactly sure which reviews to trust.

Do you have any questions for us?