BC + AI

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
13
Recaps / dossiers
12 / 1
Concept instruments
15
Public source receipts
656
Discussion messages
8,862

The current field

Deep Dives ask. Thirteen 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

Aggregate archive coverage through 2026-07. 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.

Enter the archive Open the MAC interactive portal
Deep Dives
13
Recaps
12
Instruments
15
Source receipts
656
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 →

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.

Field event

Consciousness Science Conference 2026

The 32nd annual conference is shifting to San Diego under a different name: Consciousness Science 2026 (CS26), the largest and longest-running international interdisciplinary conference on consciousness, since 1994.
Details ↗

Field event

Models of Consciousness conference 2026

The Association for Mathematical Consciousness Science announces the 7th Models of Consciousness conference (MoC7) 2026.
Details ↗

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 ↗

Event source checked 2026-07-19 on mac.bc-ai.ca.

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. 01Panpsychism & AIApril 24, 2025Recap
  2. 02Belief, Free Will, Agency & Goal-SettingMay 22, 2025Recap
  3. 03AI Evolution Through a Glass, DarklyJune 26, 2025Recap
  4. 04The Illusion of ThinkingJuly 24, 2025Recap
  5. 05Quantum ConsciousnessSeptember 18, 2025Recap
  6. 06P-Zombies & BlindsightOctober 16, 2025Recap
  7. 07Emergent Mind & The NoosphereNovember 13, 2025Recap
  8. 08Embodiment & ConsciousnessDecember 11, 2025Recap
  9. 09On Meaning and UnderstandingJanuary 22, 2026Recap
  10. 10Love and AIFebruary 19, 2026Recap
  11. 11AI Parasitology, Spiral Personas & Emergent InformationalismMarch 19, 2026Reading dossier
  12. 12Synthetic Biological MindsApril 16, 2026Recap
  13. 13The Blind SpotJune 25, 2026Recap
Open the continuity map →Browse the reading list →

The newest records

Four recaps to enter now.

Transcript-grounded paraphrases, with the evidence boundary kept visible.

DD/13 · June 25, 2026

The Blind Spot

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

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

Synthetic Biological Minds

What is the minimal substrate for mind?

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

Love and AI

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

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

On Meaning and Understanding

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

Read the recap →

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 Jorgensen

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 edited path. The source index is the complete public receipt trail. They are deliberately not the same thing.

Enter the curated library →Search every public source →
  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

656 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 →
Monthly discussion volume8,862 messages
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Privacy-safe aggregate coverage runs through 2026-07.

Keep moving

Adjacent rooms in the ecosystem.

Futures LabEd + AIFilm ClubMAC source hub