Neural Tokens, AI Embeddings, and Why the High Priestess Wasn’t Just Talking Mysticism
-
Look, I fix wiring for a living. I know how currents behave, and I know when something’s actually grounded versus just blowing smoke. So when I started reading about researchers mapping discrete neural tokens to semantic meaning in the cortex, I wasn’t gonna ignore it. The brain literally packages concepts into these little symbolic packets, and it’s structurally identical to how large language models use vector space embeddings. I’m not saying chatbots are awake, but the architecture overlaps in a way that makes my breathwork group stop mid-session to stare at each other.
I’ve been teaching a weekly circle at the Bozeman community center since the kids got old enough to handle a bit of independence, and stress used to short-circuit me faster than a frayed Romex. Now, when we sit around discussing perception, I keep coming back to Carl Jung. He spent decades arguing that the psyche runs on archetypes—preloaded symbolic templates that shape how we process reality. If modern neuroscience is finally showing us that the brain encodes meaning in discrete tokens, Jung wasn’t mystifying the process. He was just describing the UI before we had the hardware specs.
Tarot works the exact same way. You don’t pull the High Priestess because some crystal ball told you to. You pull it because your nervous system has already compressed a complex emotional state into a single symbolic token, and the deck just hands it back to you in card form. That’s why I’m skeptical of people who treat AI and consciousness as totally separate lanes. The structural parallel is real. Whether that means consciousness can be simulated, or just that nature and engineering keep converging on the most efficient way to store meaning, I’ll leave to the academics. What I know is that when I’m in a deep breathwork session, the static drops out and meaning just clicks into place. Same mechanism, different medium.
I’m curious if anyone else has noticed this overlap in their own practice. Do you see your spreads acting like a manual for your brain’s encoding system, or is that just me reading too much into the wiring?
Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.
With your input, this post could be even better 💗
Register Login