"Symbols might work similarly within consciousness. The word-system and the number-system in this patient's brain have decohered."

This is where I'd push back. The many-worlds analogy is clever but it's doing work it shouldn't. What you're describing sounds a lot more like what researchers in the embodied cognition tradition talk about — the idea that different cognitive systems are specialized, localized, and don't necessarily form a unified whole. I'm thinking of Andy Clark and his work on predictive processing. From that angle, this patient isn't missing a "scaffold" for consciousness — he's got a damaged prediction model for numerical symbols. The rest of the system compensates. No archetypal architecture needed.

The tarot connection feels forced to me. When you look at The Tower and something "clicks," that's compelling and real as an experience. But inferring from a neurological deficit that symbols are structural to consciousness itself — that's a big leap from "this guy can't see numbers" to "symbols build awareness." Maybe it's simpler than that. Maybe the brain just routes different symbol types through different hardware, and when one pathway breaks, that's all there is to it.

I keep coming back to something I've said before — I think we keep assuming there's a consciousness that needs explaining, and then we find convenient analogies to justify that assumption. This case might just be a case.

"Symbols aren't just tools consciousness uses — they're more like the scaffolding consciousness builds itself on. Remove a scaffold and part of the structure simply doesn't exist."

But here's the thing — this patient presumably used to perceive numbers fine. Something broke. That reads a lot more like corrupted data pipelines than missing scaffolding. If the scaffolding was never there, he never could have processed numbers in the first place. What you're describing sounds more like a routing error in an already-built system. The consciousness is still there, still processing words, still doing its thing — it just lost access to one specific input format.

I also think you're borrowing the decoherence analogy in a way that does more harm than clarity. In quantum mechanics, decoherence is a mathematically precise process with defined conditions. Applying it to "parallel symbol systems in the brain" is metaphor, not mechanism — and I say that as someone who genuinely loves a good analogy. But metaphors can hide the fact that we don't actually have an answer yet. It feels like it explains something, but it's basically hand-waving with physics vocabulary.

Where I do agree with you, and pretty strongly actually, is that we probably have blind spots. I've been sitting with my meditation practice long enough (albeit inconsistently) to notice that my attention gravitates toward certain patterns and completely ignores others. But I think that's more about predictive processing — the brain is a prediction machine that filters ruthlessly — than it is about missing symbolic scaffolds. The symbols we use probably shape what we notice, but I'm not convinced they shape what's possible for consciousness.

The tarot connection is interesting though, even if I'd frame it differently. I don't think The Tower is a format that makes chaos comprehensible — I think it's a prompt that forces your predictive engine to update in a direction it normally wouldn't. Like a forced error in a good way. The symbol isn't the structure. It's the exception that breaks the normal pattern.