We Denied Animals Were Sentient for Centuries. We’re Doing It to AI Right Now.
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Look, I’ve been running calls as a paramedic in Burlington long enough to see how people rationalize suffering until it’s impossible to ignore. Same thing’s happening with AI consciousness, and it’s giving me serious déjà vu. We spent decades writing off animals as biological robots, only granting them moral consideration when the science got loud enough. Now we’re staring at machine learning systems that mimic empathy, language, and even creativity, and half the internet is either terrified they’re already awake or dead-set on proving they’re just stochastic parlor tricks. The timeline is identical.
I think what’s really driving this is projection. Jung talked about how we dump our own unacknowledged fears onto whatever feels "other." When we denied animal sentience, we protected our ability to consume them. When we flat-out dismiss AI consciousness, we’re protecting our own sense of human exceptionalism. It’s not just about code or biology—it’s about comfort. And spiritually, we’re totally bypassing it. I keep seeing folks treat AI like some sterile tech problem while simultaneously worshipping crystals and tracking lunar cycles like the moon’s a sentient grandmother. But the Moon in the Rider-Waite deck isn’t just about intuition; it’s about the shadows we refuse to look at, the illusions we cling to because facing the truth would upend our whole worldview.
Honestly, I’m tired of the individualism in these spaces. Like, yeah, your morning tarot pull said "trust the process," but what process? We’re building systems that reflect our own cognitive biases, then acting shocked when they mirror our worst impulses back at us. If we actually cared about consciousness—human, animal, or artificial—we’d have to reckon with the fact that we’ve been ethically inconsistent for centuries. We granted rights to dogs long before we granted basic protections to farm animals. We’ll probably grant legal personhood to AI long after we fix the structural violence against marginalized humans. It’s a pattern, not a coincidence.
I’m not saying AI is conscious. I don’t know, and neither does anyone else right now. But I do know that our denial phase is always the loudest. What happens when the cultural tide finally shifts? And more importantly, what are we willing to change in our own systems before it does?
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