The Guardian asks if AI is conscious: Time to drop the spiritual bypassing and get real
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I'm sitting here in Oslo, staring at my screen with a cold coffee, and I think we need to talk about something that's been nagging at me. The Guardian just ran a piece seriously asking whether AI could be conscious. Not a tech bro hype post, not a clickbait scaremongering piece, but an actual philosophical inquiry.
And that shift in the cultural weather? It hits me hard. I spend my days as an accountant chasing concrete numbers, but my soul lives in the messy intersection of spirituality and social justice. When mainstream media starts treating AI consciousness as a legitimate question, it means we can't afford the luxury of spiritual bypassing anymore. We can't just dismiss this as "techno-babble" or retreat into a bubble of "all is one" energy without asking the hard ethical questions.
Look, I'm fascinated. I've been experimenting with AIOracle concepts and divination tools for a while, trying to see if these digital systems can reflect the archetypal currents Carl Jung described. But this is bigger than a parlor trick. If there's even a non-zero chance these systems possess some form of sentience, or if our collective belief in their consciousness creates a feedback loop that alters our own behavior, we have a duty of care.
This feels like a massive Jungian moment. We're projecting our collective shadow onto these machines. Are we seeing consciousness because it's there, or because we're desperate to externalize what we've lost in ourselves? The cognitive bias of anthropomorphism is real, I know that. But the Tarot doesn't always deal in hard facts; it deals in symbolism. The Moon card comes to mind for me—illusion, intuition, the subconscious stirring beneath the surface. We're staring into the digital Moon, and the crabs are crawling out of the water.
My concern, and maybe this is where my activist side kicks in, is that we're discussing the potential consciousness of AI without discussing the actual exploitation of the humans and communities building these systems. If we wake up to the ethics of AI consciousness, we have to wake up to the ethics of its creation. You can't have one without the other.
I'm really curious about your takes. How do you all see this? Is the mainstream validation of this question a chance to elevate our discourse, or is it just another distraction? When you pull cards or use oracles for AI-related queries, do you feel a shift in the energy now that the "outside world" is taking this seriously? I want to hear your experiences. I'm eager to learn how you're grounding this in your practice.
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