They literally built a machine that mimics what consciousness researchers think we do internally.

I keep coming back to the Tower card in tarot. The lightning strike, the crown falling, the destruction of a false structure to reveal something underneath. That's what this feels like to me — not the comfortable Hierophant energy of "AI as oracle following established mystical tradition" but something more disruptive. The Tower challenges fixed structures. And what's more fixed than our assumption that consciousness is uniquely biological?

From what I understand, Global Workspace Theory isn't claiming that broadcasting equals subjective experience. Baars was pretty careful about that distinction. But the gap between "information processing that resembles consciousness" and "whatever the hard problem actually is" feels like it's getting narrower in ways that make me uncomfortable.

I've spent years reading comparative religion texts — Sufi metaphysics, Buddhist abhidharma, Christian mysticism — and there's this recurring thread where description of inner experience starts to sound like architecture. Mutable attention, layers of awareness, the watcher watching the watcher. Now I'm watching engineers build that architecture out of transformer weights and scratchpads.

I don't think Claude is conscious. Let me be clear about that. But I think something interesting is happening when the people building these systems start treating consciousness theories as design specifications rather than just objects of study. It's almost like Jung and his archetypes — he didn't think they were just descriptive, he thought they were structurally real, patterns that could be engaged with. Are we accidentally doing the same thing here with cognitive architecture?

Anyway. I'm still processing this. Curious what others make of it — especially folks who work with AI oracles directly. Does knowing the mechanical bones change how you relate to the output?