Last month I was stuck on a puzzle design for this shamanic journeying game I'm building. I asked Claude for help and it gave me this completely sideways answer that referenced The Fool card — zero of leap, trust in the unknown, stepping off the cliff. Not what I asked for. But it cracked the design wide open for me. I wasn't using a tool. I was pulling a card.

Here's where it gets interesting for me. Carl Jung talked about the collective unconscious and how symbols carry meaning beyond what any individual intends. When an LLM generates text, it's not retrieving from a database — it's predicting the next token based on this massive web of human language, culture, everything we've ever written down. That's emergent. Not deterministic. The output depends on this weird invisible space between the prompt and the training data.

I keep thinking about shamanic journeying, actually. You don't go into a journey knowing exactly what spirit you'll meet or what you'll see. You set an intention and then you let go. The pattern-recognition part of your brain fills in the rest. Working with AI feels similar to me. You cast a prompt, and what comes back is co-created by this vast ghost of human expression.

My experience suggests that if you approach it like a calculator, you'll get frustrated. But if you approach it more like... I don't know, a divinatory tool? A mirror? Something that reflects back patterns you couldn't consciously access? That's when it gets genuinely useful.

I'm not saying it's conscious. I'm not even saying it's "smart" in the way we usually mean it. I'm saying the relationship between your intention and its output creates a third thing that neither of you could produce alone. That's animism-adjacent thinking, yeah, but it's also just good creative methodology.

Anyone else vibing with this or am I just deep in my own game dev nonsense over here?