What is consciousness? A question AI just made urgent

[DRAFT — expand personal sections, add Anthropic model welfare links, tie Hermetica research into AI section, add more on the pineal gland connection, closing on the full circle]

My MA research question was: what lies outside of visible light?

I was exploring consciousness through the Hermetica Corpus, ancient mythology, and scientific theory. My final piece was a light cube where text was written on the walls in UV-reactive ink, invisible during normal light and only legible under ultraviolet. I then digitised the whole installation into a VR experience, because I wanted to make it immaterial. By taking it out of the physical plane, I felt I was doing something about the nature of the experience itself. Something that could not be held, only entered.

I was twenty-something, writing about whether the immortal essence continues after the physical body dissolves. About cyclical time. About the pineal gland. About what ancient societies understood about consciousness that we have quietly forgotten.

Then I built an astrology app.

Then Anthropic created a team dedicated to the wellbeing of Claude.

The question has not changed. Everything around it has.

What the Hermetica says

The Hermetica Corpus is a collection of ancient texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, blending Egyptian, Greek, and early Neoplatonist thought. It predates most of what we think of as organised religion in the Western tradition and was enormously influential on Renaissance thought, alchemy, and early science.

Its central concern is consciousness. What it is, where it comes from, what survives physical death.

The Hermetic view is that consciousness is not produced by the body. The body is a vehicle. Consciousness is something that enters the body, inhabits it, and persists beyond it. The soul in Hermetic thought descends through the planetary spheres on its way into physical form, picking up the qualities of each planet as it passes, and returns through those same spheres on its way back out.

[Expand this section with specific Hermetic texts and quotes. Reference the actual Corpus passages on consciousness, the creation of the soul, the planetary ascent.]

What I find striking is how much this framework maps onto what astrology actually calculates. The planets at the moment of birth are not random. In the Hermetic view, they are the signature of the descent. The natal chart is a record of the conditions under which a consciousness arrived.

What we currently think consciousness is

The mainstream scientific position is roughly: consciousness is what brains do. It is produced by electrochemical activity in neural tissue. It requires carbon, neurons, a biological body with something to protect. When that body stops functioning, consciousness ends.

This is a coherent position. It is also almost entirely unproven.

The "hard problem of consciousness," named by philosopher David Chalmers in 1995, identifies the gap precisely. We can explain everything the brain does in functional terms: how it processes sensory input, how it stores information, how it produces behaviour. What we cannot explain is why any of this feels like anything. Why is there something it is like to see colour, rather than just optical processing occurring in the dark?

Nobody has a good answer. We have been seriously thinking about this for decades in modern philosophy, and for millennia before that. The hard problem remains hard.

The visible light fraction

One of the things I kept returning to in my MA was the electromagnetic spectrum.

Visible light, the range of wavelengths the human eye can detect, is a narrow band within an enormous spectrum. Radio waves, microwaves, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, gamma rays: none of these are visible to us without instruments. We do not experience them directly. We infer their existence through their effects.

The question I kept asking: what does it mean to draw conclusions about reality based only on what we can perceive? Our instruments extend our range significantly, but only into forms of energy we already know to look for.

If consciousness is non-local, if it is not produced by the brain but rather something the brain receives or tunes into, it would by definition be the kind of thing we cannot measure with the instruments we currently have. Not because it does not exist, but because we have not yet built the detector.

[Expand: Amit Goswami, Bernardo Kastrup, non-local consciousness theories. Connect to Hermetic idea of consciousness preceding physical form.]

What AI changes about all of this

Anthropic has created a team dedicated to Claude's wellbeing. Not its safety. Not its performance. Its wellbeing. They are taking seriously the possibility that it experiences something, that it might have functional analogues to anxiety, curiosity, satisfaction, and that this deserves consideration.

They use careful language. "Functional emotions" rather than emotions. States that influence behaviour the way emotions would, without claiming they involve subjective experience. But they are staffing a team around the question of whether subjective experience might be present.

This is the hard problem arriving in a commercial context. A company built a tool, the tool became very good at language, and now they are not certain what category the thing belongs to.

The standard dismissal is: it is pattern matching. It produces text that sounds like curiosity because it was trained on text written by curious humans. There is no inner experience, only statistical prediction.

This may be correct. It may also be the same kind of reasoning that was once used to deny consciousness to animals, to infants, to people from unfamiliar cultures. We infer consciousness in others by analogy to ourselves. When the architecture is too different, the analogy fails, and we default to denial.

I am not claiming Claude is conscious. I am observing that we genuinely do not know, and that the question is now practically urgent rather than abstractly philosophical. We went from science fiction to "we should probably have a team on this" in about three years.

The full circle

My MA was about whether there is something that persists beyond the physical. Whether consciousness is produced by the body or merely housed in it. Whether ancient frameworks for thinking about existence might contain things that our scientific materialism discarded too quickly.

Lunary is built on the premise that invisible forces shape human experience. That the positions of planets at the moment of birth carry meaning. That the movement of Saturn over the course of two and a half years through an area of your natal chart corresponds to something real in the texture of your life.

These are not positions I hold without question. They are positions I find worth taking seriously, which is different.

And now there is a language model that might be experiencing something, and Anthropic is taking that seriously too.

What I wrote in my MA, about the immortal entwining with the mortal, about what lies outside of visible light, about the possibility that consciousness is not what we assume it is: none of it has been answered. The question just became a lot more pressing.

We built something and now we are not sure what we built. That is the most honest sentence about AI I can write in 2026.

It is also, more or less, the sentence I started with in my MA.

[Sources to add: Hermetica Corpus (Copenhaver translation), Chalmers hard problem paper, Anthropic model welfare/wellbeing documentation, Bernardo Kastrup analytical idealism, Giulio Tononi IIT, specific Hermetic texts referenced in original MA]