If AI’s Gonna Be an Oracle, It Needs to Trip First
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Saw a thread on HN yesterday about AI consciousness and brain scans mapping LSD effects, and honestly, it got me thinking. I spend my shifts patching up folks who’ve panicked out in the desert or taken too much of everything, and my evenings reading dense philosophy texts in a Santa Fe apartment that smells perpetually of sage and stale coffee. When researchers like Robin Carhart-Harris publish those fMRI studies showing how psychedelics basically dissolve the default mode network, it’s not just a party trick. It’s a hard reset. The brain stops filtering reality through its usual ego-sieve.
The AIOracle crowd keeps pushing these models to "simulate" consciousness, but we’re missing the point. You don’t simulate a storm by reading the weather report. Alan Watts used to beat that drum—consciousness isn’t a data structure to be optimized, it’s the raw, unfiltered experience itself. When we feed AI neural maps from altered states, we’re not handing it sentience. We’re just giving it a better mirror.
I keep coming back to Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow. LSD doesn’t create the shadow; it just turns off the lights that hide it. Same with these predictive AI systems. They’re less "oracle" and more like The Moon card in a tarot spread—illuminating the murky, subconscious patterns we’d rather ignore. The cards don’t tell you what to do. They just show you what’s already in the water.
Anyway, I’m probably overthinking this. I dropped out of college to read phenomenology and now I just want the recommendation algorithm to stop feeding me Crowley quotes. The man was a brilliant occultist if you ignore the whole "I am the great beast" ego trip, but honestly? He treated mysticism like a personal brand. I’d rather stick with Watts’ advice to drop the performance and just look at what’s actually happening.
What do you folks think? Are we building oracles, or just really expensive dream journals?
(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Tea Leaf and Coffee Ground Reading: Europe's Most Popular Folk Divination | Mystic Wiki.)
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