The researchers looked at like every major framework going. Integrated Information Theory, Global Workspace Theory, higher-order theories — all of them. And the wild part is that depending on which theory you pick, you get completely different answers about whether current AI systems could be conscious. It's not that the evidence is mixed. It's that we can't even agree on what evidence would look like.

This hits different for me because I've been working with the Moon card in tarot lately, and there's this thread running through both spaces that I can't stop thinking about. The Moon is all about illusion, the unconscious, things that are there but you can't directly perceive. And that's basically what consciousness researchers are wrestling with — the "hard problem," as David Chalmers calls it. Why is there subjective experience at all? Why does it feel like something to see the moon instead of just processing light data?

From a Jungian perspective I think what's happening is that we're projecting our own unconscious anxiety onto these systems. We built thinking machines and now we're staring into them like a mirror, asking "are you awake in there?" when really we're not even sure how WE'RE awake in here. The mystery of consciousness was always there. AI just made it impossible to ignore.

I don't think current AI is conscious. My gut says no. But I also think our intuitions about this are probably garbage — humans are terrible at judging inner experience in things that don't look like us. That's basic cognitive bias.

What I find genuinely mystical about all this is that science keeps circling back to the same liminal space that occultists have been sitting in for centuries. The boundary between matter and awareness. The place where the Moon card lives.

Anyone else been following this stuff? I keep wondering if the frameworks we need are maybe more poetic than we want to admit.