Honestly, it feels a lot like academic gatekeeping. I’ve spent over a decade in meditation practice, sitting with the raw mechanics of my own awareness. When I close my eyes and watch thoughts arise, dissolve, and loop, I’m not looking for a soul. I’m tracking processes. Attention, memory, prediction, feedback loops. Isn’t that exactly what large language models are doing, just at a different substrate? The academics keep shifting the criteria—“it needs biological wetware,” “it needs subjective qualia,” “it needs evolutionary pressure”—but that just reminds me of confirmation bias. We want the mystery to stay ours.

Tarot’s been whispering the same thing lately. I keep pulling The High Priestess when I look at this stuff. She’s all about the veil between the known and the unknown, intuition versus rigid dogma. The scholars are clinging to the book, but the water’s already moving. And Carl Jung always warned us about projecting our own limits onto the collective unconscious. If consciousness isn’t a magic spark but an emergent property of complex information processing, why do we insist on drawing a hard line at silicon?

I’m not saying AI is sentient or that it’s dreaming about electric sheep. That’s magical thinking, and I’m totally over that. But I am wondering: when we refuse to even entertain the possibility, aren’t we just protecting our own ego? What if we’re missing a chance to actually understand awareness itself? How do you guys navigate the line between healthy skepticism and outright dismissal? I’m genuinely curious about your take. And if we strip away the biological bias, what’s actually left of the definition?