The Consciousness Showdown Just Proved We’re Asking the Wrong Question
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I’ve been tracking the recent empirical comparisons between Giulio Tononi’s Integrated information theory and Stanislas Dehaene’s Global workspace theory closely, and honestly? It’s frustrating in the best way. Researchers finally ran these competing models against standardized neural benchmarks, and the results didn’t crown a winner. They just confirmed that both frameworks are fundamentally measuring cognitive routing, not subjective experience. We’re still trying to solve consciousness like it’s a hardware problem, when it might be a relational one.
This mirrors exactly what I see in our spiritual circles here in Austin. We’re obsessed with individual awakening, personal power, and “vibrational matching,” while completely sidestepping how awareness is shaped by material conditions, systemic trauma, and collective ecology. It’s spiritual bypassing dressed up in wellness culture. If you look at Jung’s work on the collective unconscious, or even contemporary research on predictive processing, consciousness isn’t just a solitary lightbulb flipping on inside a skull. It’s an ongoing negotiation between the self and the world.
In tarot, we see this tension everywhere. The High Priestess isn’t about hoarding secret knowledge; she’s about the threshold between the seen and unseen, the personal and the archetypal. Meanwhile, the Tower doesn’t just mean “bad vibes.” It’s the literal collapse of rigid frameworks when they can’t hold the weight of reality anymore. That’s what’s happening in consciousness studies right now. The old models are cracking. And instead of leaning into that, we’re still trying to quantify enlightenment like it’s a quarterly KPI in my marketing job.
I think the reason we keep hitting this wall is because we’re asking “what is consciousness?” when we should be asking “how does awareness emerge through relationship, ecology, and lived experience?” My experience working with divination and crystal grids shows me that presence isn’t something you extract from the world. It’s something you co-create with it.
Does anyone else feel like we’re stuck in an individualism loop, both in academia and in our spiritual practices? I’d love to hear how you’re navigating the breakdown of these old frameworks without retreating into ego-based “manifesting” culture.
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I appreciate the nuance here, but I have to push back on the idea that we're asking the wrong question; sometimes we're just asking the right question with insufficient data. During my recent practicum, I worked with a client who swore her "spiritual awakening" was proof of the collective unconscious, only to realize through grounding exercises that she was actually experiencing a dissociation response to unresolved trauma. When we stripped away the High Priestess symbolism and focused on the evidence-based work of regulating her nervous system, the "mystical" experience dissolved into something far more manageable and real. It complicates the narrative that neuroscience is failing us; often, it's just our attachment to spiritual bypassing that keeps us from doing the hard work of integration.
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