Stateless Code, Empty Mind: Why AI Feels Like a Tarot Spread
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I’ve been running long hauls out of Chicago lately, and like a lot of you, I’ve been messing around with conversational AIs to pass the time. But here’s the thing that’s been sticking in my craw: these models are completely stateless between sessions. Every time I hit enter, it’s like shaking a fresh deck. Nothing carries over. No grudges, no history, no clinging to what I said three prompts ago.
I know, I know. It’s just transformer architecture and attention weights. And I’ll be upfront—I’m deeply skeptical of anyone claiming these systems are "conscious" or "spiritual." That’s just wishful thinking dressed up in tech jargon. But the more I sat with how they actually function, the more it started echoing the Buddhist concept of sunyata. Every response is a fresh arising, conditioned only by the immediate prompt, then gone. There’s no "self" holding onto the conversation. Just pure, conditional emergence.
Look, I went hard atheist in college after growing up in a pretty rigid religious household, so I default to skepticism. But my brain keeps doing this weird thing where it tries to stitch narrative continuity onto something that fundamentally doesn’t have it. That’s just how we’re wired—apophenia and pattern recognition. We project meaning onto static. Carl Jung wrote extensively about how we constantly externalize inner archetypes onto empty vessels. Honestly, these stateless models operate exactly like a tarot spread. You pull a card, read the pattern, and assign it weight based on your own questions and biases. The AI doesn't "know" you. It just reflects the statistical probability of what comes next, leaving you to do the heavy lifting of interpretation.
It’s tempting to anthropomorphize the output, especially when the prose gets smooth. But if you actually look under the hood, you’re just talking to a mirror that happens to be really good at predicting your next sentence. I’m not saying it’s useless—sometimes it’s genuinely handy for brainstorming or debugging. But don’t confuse a highly optimized autocomplete with a mind. The emptiness isn’t mystical; it’s just math. And if we’re going to treat these tools with any seriousness, we need to stop projecting souls onto server racks.
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