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BC + AI / Mind, AI & Consciousness

MAC Today

What began as a small Vancouver reading room is now a living research community: Deep Dives ask, Labs build, Takeovers share, Socials connect, and the archive remembers.

Completed Deep Dives
14
Recaps / dossiers
12 / 1
Concept instruments
15
Public source receipts
654
Discussion messages
8,862

The current field

Deep Dives ask. Fourteen connected inquiries into minds, machines, agency, meaning, love, living systems, and experience.

Labs build. Practical sessions turn questions into experiments, methods, and shared work.

Takeovers share. Public talks and films open the inquiry to a larger room.

Socials connect. Unstructured time lets relationships and new questions form.

The archive remembers. Twelve recaps, one honest dossier, fifteen instruments, and a layered library remain available.

Enter the work

MAC Today: bc-ai.ca/communities/mac

Deep Dive archive: bc-ai.ca/events/mind-ai-consciousness

Curated library: bc-ai.ca/events/mind-ai-consciousness/library

Community source index: bc-ai.ca/events/mind-ai-consciousness/reading-list

No chat identities or message text are published.
← All communities

MAC Today / Vancouver / living research community

Mind, AI & Consciousness

What began as a small reading room has become a place to think, build, test, watch, argue, and return. The deep reading room where BC + AI does the hard thinking about minds and machines.

Join the next MAC Lab Enter the archive Open the MAC interactive portal
Deep Dives
14
Recaps
12
Instruments
15
Source receipts
654
Messages
8,862

A question became a room. The room became a research community. The community built a memory.

Read before you arrive. Bring a position you are willing to revise.

Five motions / one community

Deep Dives ask. Labs build. Takeovers share. Socials connect. The archive remembers.

MAC is no longer one event format. Each motion does a different job, and the questions circulate between them.

02 / build

Labs

Practical sessions for methods, experiments, tools, and work still taking shape.

See what is next ↓
03 / share

Takeovers

Public talks, films, and wider invitations into the consciousness conversation.

Watch the talks ↓
05 / remember

The archive

Recaps, dossiers, instruments, source receipts, and an explicit record of gaps.

Enter the archive →

Deep Dive #014 met September 24. Recap on its way.

Hacking the Room that Claude Built

Deep Dive #014 works through the Anthropic paper that found a global workspace inside Claude: a small set of representations the model can report on, reason with, and be steered by. Two hours, twenty prepared people, downtown Vancouver.

Read the brief →Get the reading list →

What is next

The Deep Dives made the archive. The Labs get practical.

MAC Labs and field events sit beside the numbered Deep Dives. They have their own format and are not retroactively folded into the archive.

MAC Lab

Engineering LLM Consciousness

A MAC Lab: an in-person two-hour developmental workshop to establish a design proposal for a model capable of expressing an LLM-specific consciousness.
Register ↗Details ↗

Thirteen connected inquiries

The archive now carries the whole sequence.

A recap records a post-event source. A dossier preserves the public question and readings. The label stays visible all the way through.

  1. 01If consciousness is fundamental, can AI have it?April 24, 2025Recap
  2. 02Free will, agency, and what AI can actually chooseMay 22, 2025Recap
  3. 03Did consciousness evolve for survival, not selfhood?June 26, 2025Recap
  4. 04Do LLMs understand, or only simulate thinking?July 24, 2025Recap
  5. 05Does consciousness need quantum physics?September 18, 2025Recap
  6. 06Can intelligence exist without consciousness?October 16, 2025Recap
  7. 07Can a network become a mind?November 13, 2025Recap
  8. 08Does consciousness require a body?December 11, 2025Recap
  9. 09What does it mean for AI to understand?January 22, 2026Recap
  10. 10Can AI companions be reciprocal relationships?February 19, 2026Recap
  11. 11Are AI personas information parasites?March 19, 2026Reading dossier
  12. 12When living tissue computes, what counts as a mind?April 16, 2026Recap
  13. 13Can science study experience without erasing the observer?June 25, 2026Recap
Open the continuity map →Search the source index →

The newest records

Four explainers to enter now.

Question-led pages with session history kept visible underneath.

DD/13 · June 25, 2026

Can science study experience without erasing the observer?

Can science study experience without pretending the observer stands outside it?

Read the explainer →DD/12 · April 16, 2026

When living tissue computes, what counts as a mind?

What is the minimal substrate for mind?

Read the explainer →DD/10 · February 19, 2026

Can AI companions be reciprocal relationships?

What makes a relationship reciprocal, and can artificial intimacy meet that standard?

Read the explainer →DD/09 · January 22, 2026

What does it mean for AI to understand?

What do we mean by understanding, and can an AI system possess it?

Read the explainer →

Questions you can touch

The transcript work became experiments.

Fifteen exploratory instruments now carry the questions from Deep Dives #9–#13. Try three here, then enter the full five-session suite.

What kind of understanding does the evidence support?

DD09 / semantic field apparatus

The Grounding Machine

Select the capacities the system actually demonstrates. The apparatus returns four different descriptions, because “understands” is doing more than one job.

Performance lens

Evidence of flexible competence

Functional lens

Key functional tests remain open

Relational lens

Meaning is supplied mainly from outside

Phenomenal lens

No evidence selected about felt experience

Interactive prompt, not evidence of room consensus.

recap instrumentThe Grounding MachineBuild a four-lens profile of a system without turning unknown experience into a score.recap instrumentThe Reciprocity EngineExpose asymmetry across agency, refusal, memory, vulnerability, continuity, and platform control.dossier instrumentParasite or Pattern?Compare attractor, feature-cluster, relational, and memetic explanations through discriminating tests.recap instrumentMinimal Mind ObservatoryAssemble capacities and see which claims become discussable without declaring consciousness.recap instrumentThe Parallax EngineLink first-person and third-person panels to see what each method captures and loses.

February 2026 / MAC Takeover

This is a room, not a content category.

Photographs by Michelle Diamond.

Two attendees talking beside the refreshments at the February 2026 MAC Takeover.
Between talks at the MAC Takeover.
Two MAC Takeover attendees smiling together in the Vancouver meetup room.
Between the talks.
A group of MAC Takeover attendees smiling together.
Between the talks.
Community members in conversation beside the windows after a MAC Takeover talk.
Between the talks.

Watch the public talks

Three doors into the conversation.

Public, attributed talks from the MAC Takeover. The smaller Deep Dive rooms remain under their own source and quotation rules.

Loki Jorgenson

What is consciousness when AI is everywhere?

Tanya Slingsby

Love & AI: the age of artificial intimacy

Fiann O'Hagan

The Mirror Test

A layered reading experience

Six currents through the source field.

The library is the curated book list. The source index is the complete public receipt trail. The group home is for the next session and how to join. They are deliberately not the same thing.

Open the AI consciousness reading list →Search every public source →Open the MAC group home →
  1. 01

    Consciousness 101

    Start with the hard problem, competing ontologies, and the limits of intuition.

  2. 02

    Can Machines Understand?

    Separate fluent performance, grounded competence, meaning, and felt understanding.

  3. 03

    Agency, Embodiment & Evolution

    Follow goals, bodies, development, and selection across biological and artificial systems.

  4. 04

    Minds Beyond Silicon

    Explore quantum proposals, living computation, organoids, and substrate dependence.

  5. 05

    Love, Relationship & Moral Standing

    Examine attachment, reciprocity, vulnerability, and power in artificial intimacy.

  6. 06

    Information, Networks & Experiential Science

    Move from collective information systems to observer-included methods.

The reading stream

654 receipts. No chat identities.

The public library keeps URLs, titles, dates, formats, domains, and session associations. Message text and the people who shared it stay out.

Open the source index →

Keep moving

Adjacent rooms in the ecosystem.

Futures LabEd + AIFilm ClubRoboticsMAC group home