Author · Correspondence
About Me
Who is climbing this tree, and why.
My name is Chuhao Guo郭楚昊, but you can call me Tree. I come from Shenzhen, China. I’m a freshman at Vanderbilt University studying Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence, and I’ve been reading and thinking about philosophy for five years.
I enjoy taking the familiar apart and rebuilding it, and searching for the art within order and structure. The deep tremor of thaumazein, or wonder, comes with it.
Outside of philosophy, I am also a baseball, soccer, and pool player, a calligrapher, and a competitive speedcuber, ranked top 5 in China for solving the Megaminx.
What I work on
I’m drawn to the questions that AI makes urgent, and this blog is where I work through them. My writing centers on four areas:
- Aesthetics. Whether algorithms can make something beautiful, and how will AI change humans’ understanding of beauty.
- Ethics. Whether AI can be a moral agent or deserve moral concern, and how it will reshape human responsibility.
- Semantics. Whether language models truly mean what they say, and what that reveals about human language and understanding.
- Consciousness. Whether machines could ever have mind, and how we could tell if they did.
Why “Porphyrian Tree”?
In the third century, Porphyry of Tyre wrote a short introduction to Aristotle’s Categories. Medieval readers turned it into a diagram: a trunk descending from substance to human, each step fixed by a difference — corporeal, animate, sensitive, rational. That tree is still, quietly, how many of us think about minds. This site is a place to test where it bends and where it breaks.