I
Mind & Mechanism
Can understanding, belief, or experience be realised in a system that was trained rather than born? What would count as evidence either way?
A research journal · Philosophy of AI
Porphyrian
Tree
Old categories, new minds..
Porphyry’s tree divided being into genus and difference, down to the rational animal. This site asks what happens to that old diagram when something new — trained, not born — starts to look rational too.
Arbor Porphyriana · after the Isagoge, c. 270 CE
§ I — Lines of inquiry
Three columns of the temple
II
Meaning & Language
Grounding, reference, and the strange semantics of models that learn words from other words.
III
Agency & Ethics
Responsibility, moral status, and what we owe to — and should demand of — artificial agents.
§ II — Recent writing
From the notebook
Why a Porphyrian Tree?
The Porphyrian tree sorted beings by genus and difference. Modern AI sorts them by distance in a vector space. What changes when classification stops being a tree?
Read →A Starter Reading List in the Philosophy of AI
Six texts I keep returning to — from Turing's imitation game to recent arguments about machine consciousness.
Read →“Whether genera and species subsist, or reside in bare thoughts alone; whether, if they subsist, they are bodies or incorporeal; and whether they are separate or exist in sensible things — these I shall decline to discuss.”