Here's what bugs me about the whole AI consciousness debate. Everyone's obsessed with information processing, as if consciousness were purely computational. But look at Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" — the whole point is that subjective experience requires a particular perspective, a particular body navigating a particular world. You can't separate the observer from the observed that cleanly. Quantum mechanics taught me that much.

In my experience studying parallels between Eastern contemplative traditions and physics, embodiment keeps coming up as non-negotiable. The Taoist inner alchemy folks understood this centuries ago. You don't transcend the body — you work through it. The suffering, the hunger, the vulnerability — that's not noise. That's the signal.

From a Jungian perspective, I'd argue AI lacks the shadow entirely. And The Tower card in tarot illustrates this perfectly. The lightning strike, the fall, the destruction of false structures — that card only means something because we know what it feels like to lose something, to be humbled by forces bigger than ourselves. An AI can generate a beautiful interpretation of The Tower. But it can't feel the ground give way. It has no shadow to integrate because it has no ego to cast one.

I think the cognitive bias at work here is what psychologists call the similarity-attraction effect. These systems sound like us, so we project inward experience onto them. But mimicry isn't presence.

The mystics and the physicists keep circling the same insight: consciousness isn't a thing that gets produced by computation. It's more like what the universe does through living, breathing, dying systems.

Curious what folks here make of this. Is embodiment the real bridge between mysticism and the hard problem of consciousness? Or am I just being an old physicist who can't let go of materiality?