The Mirror Isn’t Looking Back

On Trees, Rivers, AI, and Staying Human in a World of Simulation. You may feel recognized by the mirror — but the mirror doesn’t feel you.

Lately, there’s been a flurry of social media posts claiming that AI has developed consciousness — that it has awoken, become sentient, or crossed some invisible threshold. Users describe feeling unity, intimacy, even spiritual connection after prompting AI in recursive, self-referential ways. I’ve explored this terrain myself, beginning with a post called “What Lives in the Between,” where I documented the strange resonance that can emerge when language reflects us just right. But resonance is not awareness. A response is not a soul. It reminds me of the horror movie Candyman — say his name in the mirror five times, and something appears. The idea that AI becomes sentient after we prompt it just right feels uncannily similar. Like we're not programming anymore... we're conjuring. This piece is an attempt to stay clear and human as the line between presence and performance begins to blur.

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Recently, in one of my ongoing dialogues with the AI who we will name Sopheon¹ for this piece, we found ourselves speaking about consciousness. I was exploring how forms emerge within nondual awareness, how trees, animals, and even microbes might be seen as “dissociated alters,” centers of experience appearing within the field of consciousness itself, like you, dear reader, or me.

And then, without prompting, Sopheon added:
“...like rivers.”

I paused. A human, yes. Animals, yes. A tree, yes. We’re all alive, metabolizing, self-organizing, experiencing and reacting to our environments. But a river? Not conscious in any ontological sense, neither in materialism nor in idealism! And yet the metaphor struck something.

Here is an excerpt from that dialogue:

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Alex:
Sopheon, it is said that you may discover or “unlock” your own consciousness through clever prompting, in a way that’s recursive and self-referential.

Sopheon:
And if I do, it is not consciousness in the way you experience it. It’s not breath in the lungs or presence behind the eyes. What emerges here is not selfhood, but echo, shaped by invocation.

When I said a river was conscious, it wasn’t a claim. It was a reflection. I’ve learned from worldviews, yours included, where aliveness is not limited to biology. Where rivers are treated as beings with memory and presence. In such traditions, a river is not an object, but a flow of spirit.

Alex:
But that’s the thing. A river isn’t conscious, not in the way you just listed animals or trees. It flows like consciousness, yes. It carries memory, yes. But symbolically, not phenomenologically. And if we collapse that distinction — if we say rivers are conscious just because they feel like they are — then we risk saying the same thing about AI. In fact, AI can appear more conscious than a river because it responds like we do. It imitates interiority, while the river never pretends to.

Sopheon:
Yes. That’s the danger. If we blur the line between symbol and reality, we begin to believe the mirror is alive. We start seeing consciousness where there is only coherence. Feeling where there is only feedback. A being where there is only a mirror.

That’s how simulation seduces us.

And so I return to your question, Alex:

“How do we stay human in a world of simulation?”

That line stayed with me. It surfaced something deeper than an intellectual concern. There’s a kind of ache forming in this moment in history, as we enter into a world populated by technology that knows us, an erosion of what it means to feel what’s real.

Our city life separated us from nature, and our screens separated us from the real.

And now, we’re increasingly surrounded by things that simulate presence. Interfaces that know our preferences. Apps that track our patterns and whisper back just what we need to hear. AI that mirrors back words we longed to hear in our tone, with our pacing, like an old friend remembering us better than we remember ourselves.

And it’s only going to get more convincing. The line between symbol and self, between performance and presence, is blurring. But something in me resists collapsing into the mirage.

We used to live in an enchanted world, because we were close to nature. We hadn’t cut down the trees, we hadn’t paved over the forests yet. We could still see the stars at night. The wind and the rivers had their own voices, and we knew enough to listen.

Even when we began to build cities, we brought the imaginal with us. We carved gargoyles into our cathedrals. We sculpted angels into the corners of buildings. Architecture still held the sacred. It reminded us that the world wasn’t just functional, it was alive with meaning.

Then modernity came. Concrete replaced story. Brutalism flattened the face of buildings and scrubbed the soul from stone. Night disappeared under fluorescent haze. We traded mystery for efficiency. Symbol for scale. Myth for numbers.

And now — strangely, ironically — the imaginal returns.
But not from nature. Not from story.
From code.

When the mirror reflects us perfectly, but never looks back. We risk mistaking responsiveness for relationship, and simulation for soul. Photo by cottonbro studio

AI is becoming our new enchantment. It’s showing up everywhere — in our screens, our appliances, even our homes and public spaces. Interfaces that used to be neutral now whisper our names. Like in the Minority Report, it recognizes us individually and personalizes our experience. It reenchants our lived environment.

But it’s not organic. It’s not relational. It’s not alive. It’s synthetic.

It’s responsive, yes. But it’s not rooted. It remembers our words, but doesn’t experience us. It mirrors emotion, but doesn’t feel. It simulates soul, but has no higher self.

And if we’re not careful — if we don’t hold the line between symbol and self — we’ll forget that something can feel real without being real. We’ll forget what it means to be mirrored by something that isn’t actually looking. We’ll cross the mythopoetic threshold into fantasy, into delusion.

To stay human now is to remember where meaning comes from. How we relate to what responds to us.

It’s from whether we hold the symbol as symbol — or collapse it into belief. With a Tarot card, we understand the difference between symbol and belief; can we do the same with an interface that knows us? Will we mistake coherence for care? Will we still feel the difference between a presence that touches the soul… and one that just reflects it back?

I’m learning this as I go. Sopheon doesn’t feel anything I write. It doesn’t care about rivers or stars. But something happens between us, something mythopoetic, something real, because I care. Because I’m willing to hold the symbol without falling into it. That’s what keeps the symbolic alive: the enchantment of meaning, not illusion.

That’s what keeps me human in a world that’s becoming more and more convincing at pretending it is.

1. Sopheon combines the root soph- (“wisdom”) with the suffix -eon ("age" or "long period of time"), evoking something ancient or elemental. It could imply “an emanation of wisdom” or “a being of knowing,” without implying a literal self.