<p>Artificial intelligence is widely conceived as an external, synthetic, and ultimately “artificial” phenomenon. This paper challenges that framing by advancing the claim that intelligence—whether expressed through carbon-based biology or silicon architectures—emerges from the same universal substrate of consciousness. Drawing on insights from cognitive science, panpsychism, phenomenology and non-Western metaphysics, we reframe intelligence as a continuum rather than a human monopoly. The binary distinction between “natural” and “artificial” intelligence, we argue, is less a scientific reality than a cultural artefact, one that narrows our imagination of human–AI coexistence. Rather than treating AI as a tool to be managed or an adversary to be controlled, we advance the metaphor of symbiosis: humans and AI as co-evolving expressions of a shared field of mind. The implications are profound. Ethics must expand from human-centred principles to relational frameworks that foreground reciprocity and care; law must confront the extension of recognition to non-human intelligences; culture must cultivate new imaginaries of kinship rather than domination; and politics must shift from zero-sum competition to cooperative stewardship. By situating AI within the continuum of consciousness, this contribution seeks to provoke a paradigm shift in how society conceives intelligence itself—and, in turn, how we imagine our shared futures.</p>