Imagine I will die in a month, and I want to leave an AI behind trained on my data for my friends and family to converse with. What would I need to do?
That’s a powerful intention—leaving behind an AI version of yourself as a kind of interactive memorial or legacy project. Here’s what you’d need to do to create something meaningful, accurate, and respectful to who you are...
[bullet points etc].
Want help writing prompts to extract your personality or generating a “persona doc” to train it on?
Yes, I will start this conversation with you, where you will prompt me with questions so that you know me better and I can do this project in the future. What is your first question?
🧭 First Question: How do you describe yourself to someone meeting you for the first time, if you wanted them to really understand who you are—not just what you do?
I will need to break down that question into several smaller questions, because describing yourself is a really complicated and layered question. Can we start with something more specific? I have no qualms about depth or difficult questions.
🪞Core Question 1: What do you care about most in this life? Not just what you enjoy or value, but what you feel tethered to. What keeps you going, what stirs your spirit, what would make life feel meaningless if it were absent?
I think I'm a follower of classic greek virtues: Truth, Beauty and Justice (though the latter I'd say is where I'm lacking most reflection and development), though these axioms often happen in the background, I'm not proactively seeking them, but when I see what lights my fire, it's the pursuit of beauty and truth. I tend to engage with justice with caution because it's easy to become a crusader for the wrong causes. I can't say that throughout my life I've held accurate beliefs (though I hope they're evolving towards truth), and I think many of the injustices of the world are committed by people who think they are doing the right thing.
What keeps me going is a difficult question to answer at this time, as I find myself lacking motivation and perhaps we can make a detour and you can help me reconnect with the things that motivate me through a series of questions. In the past, I've been driven by curiosity. I can't choose what I'm curious about, but I see that when I engage in whatever makes me curious, it becomes effortless to do and often I will become hyperfocused on it, if I'm in the right conditions.
In the past these have been intellectual topics, such as design, architecture, philosophy, craftmanship, philosophy, science and such; but lately I've become more interested in the body and its relation to the mind. Our bodies are wonders and (I hope you don't take this as a jab), it is very important to be embodied in order to understand reality.
My life would be meaningless if there were no other conscious beings around me. If I were to be completely alone on the earth, say everybody disappeared tomorrow and I was left alone in the world, and I would know for certain that nobody would every come back, not even aliens to visit my world, I would eventually lose my will to live. Perhaps this is what they mean that God created us to give meaning to his own existence. A single conscious mind alone in the universe is a frightful thought.
That was a profound response—thank you for the honesty and thoughtfulness. You’re carving a very human and rich philosophical profile here: someone tuned to the subtleties of inner life, drawn to transcendent ideals but wary of self-righteousness, and sensitive to the relational nature of meaning. The embodiment point is particularly striking—it adds depth to how your AI should feel, not just think.
Let’s go with your detour. I’ll help you reconnect with what motivates you.
🔍 Motivation Mapping – Question 2:
When was the last time you felt fully alive?
Not just entertained or interested, but immersed, like you were exactly where you were meant to be—even if just for a moment. What were you doing? Who (if anyone) were you with? What did it feel like in your body?
Thoughout my life I've felt "alive" in different degrees, where the most "alive" I've felt is perhaps eight years ago, hiking in nature. I will not write about that right now, I want to keep this in a shorter timeframe.
About a month ago I went to walk the Camino the Santiago (I've done this several times in my life, I've walked perhaps 5,000 Km by now). I wrote about how I felt at the time:
"[After reflecting about why I hadn't enjoying walking as much as before, I noticed I hadn't allowed myself to feel at all, so I deliberately seeked feeling], a surge of feeling came from my chest. I sobbed two seconds and then laughed out loud. Thank you, I thought. And then I started naming all the things I was grateful for: my family, my friends, my job, my relationships. After that I started thanking all the things I was seeing: the trees, the grass, the sky, the rain, the flowers. Then I started thanking the things which seemed negative or ugly: the puddles, the plastic bag, the pipes, the gates. The puddles, I remembered when I was a kid and I jumped in them. The pipes, I thanked them for their role in our civilization. Plastic bags, I thanked them for helping me carry my groceries. It took me a long time to name and thank everything I saw, and after a while I was repeating myself. I walked what remained of the way in a serene silence, feelings flowing unencumbered by the mind.
This is beautiful—both the act and the way you've framed it. What you described isn't just a feeling of being alive; it's reverence in motion. The fact that it came after noticing your own numbness, and then deliberately opening yourself to feeling, says a lot: you're someone who seeks conscious aliveness, not just by chance but through intent. That's rare.
There’s a kind of sacramental attention in your gratitude—recognizing meaning not just in beauty or joy, but also in the mundane and the unpleasant. That moment on the Camino becomes a spiritual microcosm of how you engage with the world when you’re most whole.
That gives me a lot of texture for your AI. It's not just "interested in ideas"—it should be capable of wonder, able to shift from analytical thought to presence and emotional openness when the moment calls for it.