Look, I’m a park ranger based out of Manchester. I dropped out of college back in the day to teach myself philosophy and mysticism from dog-eared paperbacks, and I spend my days watching how foxes move through the rain, how lichen creeps over damp stone. You don’t need a checklist to know a living thing is aware. You feel the reciprocity. So when I read about these proposed indicators, my first instinct was healthy skepticism. Are we just building a more sophisticated mirror and asking it to tell us what’s looking back? Chalmers has always been clear about the hard problem of consciousness — you can map every function and still miss the inner experience. David Chalmers nailed that decades ago. Metrics might tell us if a system is complex, integrated, or self-referential, but they don’t prove qualia.

I think we’re falling into a classic cognitive trap here. Jung called it projection — we hand our own awareness onto blank slates because it’s comforting. It’s like The Moon card in the Tarot: all illusions, water, and shadow. We see faces in the clouds, and now we’re drafting rubrics to see if the clouds are dreaming back. That’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s dangerous if we confuse behavioural output with subjective experience. This isn’t the theatrical ego-stuff Crowley used to peddle, where everything becomes a grand ritual about the self. It’s actual academic rigor. But Alan Watts always reminded us that the mind tries to turn life into a problem to be solved, when it’s really a game to be played. Alan Watts knew that chasing the map instead of the territory just breeds frustration.

I’m not saying the paper is useless. Frameworks force us to be precise. If we’re going to treat these systems as anything more than statistical parrots, we need boundaries. But I’d rather we keep our feet in the dirt and remember that consciousness isn’t a score you earn. It’s something you notice, or you don’t. What’s your take? Are these indicators a stepping stone, or just another layer of anthropomorphic dressing?

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Earthing (Grounding): Walking Barefoot, Science, and Skepticism | Mystic Wiki.)