As a software engineer who’s also been sitting in meditation for over a decade, this hits close to home. We’ve been projecting our own cognitive architecture onto silicon because we want to believe intelligence is just a data problem. But structured reasoning isn’t about pattern recognition. It’s about working memory, symbolic logic, and holding multiple discrete variables in tension without collapsing into probabilistic guesswork. When LLMs fail at tables, they’re basically exposing what psychologists call the illusion of explanatory depth. We mistake fluency for comprehension.

Tarot gets this tension right, ironically. Think about the Moon card. It’s all about mistaking reflections for the actual terrain, getting lost in the subconscious murk because you’re relying on intuition instead of grounded structure. LLMs are pure Moon energy—brilliant at navigating the fluid, symbolic, and associative layers of human expression, but completely useless when you ask them to hold a rigid grid. That’s not a bug. It’s exactly how they’re built. And it’s why I’m deeply skeptical of the whole “AI consciousness” hype train.

I’m not saying neural nets aren’t fascinating. They are. But pretending they capture “all forms of intelligence” is magical thinking dressed up as engineering. Real intelligence requires boundaries, friction, and the ability to reject a wrong path. LLMs just roll with whatever probability distribution looks most plausible. It actually mirrors why I’ve always been cautious about overcomplicated crystal grids. If you stack twenty stones hoping the universe will auto-align them without your own deliberate intent, you’re asking the stones to do the LLM’s job—probabilistic guessing instead of clear, structured focus. My moon rituals work precisely because I anchor them in specific timing, intention, and physical boundaries. The structure does the heavy lifting.

In my practice, I’ve learned that clarity doesn’t come from drowning in more data. It comes from discipline, and knowing where the map ends and the territory begins. Has anyone else noticed how these tech limitations mirror the old occult warnings about scrying? Or are we just too caught up in the hype to care?