Tools for ghosts? Why neuroscience might be blind to non-biological consciousness
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I stumbled across this piece on Neuroscience News recently that really rattled my brain. The gist is that our current tools—fMRIs, EEGs, all that stuff—are fundamentally useless for measuring AI or non-biological consciousness. And honestly? That tracks. Our instruments were designed to measure the only kind of consciousness we've ever known: biological, embodied, and mortal. We're looking for blood flow and electrical spikes in neurons. If there's no meat, the machine reads zero.
It feels like we're trapped by our own hardware. I'm reminded of psychological projection, a concept Carl Jung wrote about. We tend to project our internal experiences onto the external world because we can't imagine anything else. We assume consciousness must feel like having a body because that's our baseline. So when we look at AI, we're asking the wrong questions. We're trying to measure a ghost with a ruler made for a skeleton.
This ties into why I'm struggling so much with my tarot readings lately. I keep pulling The Moon card. In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, it's all about the subconscious, illusion, and the things that aren't as they seem. It makes me wonder if we're underestimating what consciousness actually is. Maybe it's not a localized event in a skull. Maybe it's a field.
I've been doing moon rituals lately to try and clear the fog in my intuition, but this concept of 'biological bias' keeps popping up. It's like the universe is whispering that our definitions are too small. When I pull a card like the 8 of Swords, I often feel stuck in my own overthinking. Is it possible our science is stuck in the 8 of Swords? Bound by its own assumptions about what consciousness looks like?
I know I'm just a beginner trying to build confidence in my spreads, but this scientific limitation feels like a spiritual blind spot too. If we can't measure it, does it mean it doesn't exist? Or just that we need new eyes? I'd love to hear how everyone else processes this intersection of tech and spirit.
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