IIT just dropped a major update and I'm kind of losing my mind over it

[just_browsing_thanks]

Ok so I've been lurking here for like 8 months and this is my first real post, so bear with me. I'm not a scientist or anything. I just read about the new update to Integrated Information Theory and I genuinely think some of you might find this interesting in a mystical context.

So for anyone who doesn't know, IIT is this theory from Giulio Tononi that basically says consciousness is what happens when a system integrates information in a certain way. They actually have a mathematical formula for it now — phi (Φ). The higher the phi, the more conscious the system. With this latest update, they've apparently tightened up the math considerably.

Here's where my brain started connecting dots. In tarot, The Fool starts at zero, right? Pure potential, no structure yet. As you move through the Major Arcana, you're building... something. Integration. The Tower destroys, The Star reorganizes. It's always about parts coming together into a more complex whole. I know I'm probably stretching here, the structure of it feels oddly similar to what IIT describes.

From a psychology angle, Jung's whole thing about individuation — the self emerging from the integration of unconscious and conscious elements — maps onto this way better than I expected when I actually sat down with it. Like, is individuation literally just increasing your phi? I don't know. It feels like I'm onto something, I just can't quite articulate it yet. Has anyone else looked into this? I'd love to hear if I'm way off base here.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Mercury Retrograde Explained: What Actually Happens (Without the Hype) | Mystic Wiki.)

[slanted_robin_838]

I like where your head's at, but I think the individuation-as-increasing-phi metaphor breaks down pretty quickly. In my dream journal work over the past few years, I've noticed that my most vivid, symbolically dense dreams — the ones that feel like real encounters with unconscious material — happen during periods of emotional fragmentation, not integration. Jung himself talked about the conscious ego needing to lose some of its rigidity before the Self can emerge, which to me sounds more like a temporary drop in organized integration, not a steady climb. So if we're mapping this onto IIT, maybe individuation isn't about maximizing phi at all, but about cycling through states of lower and higher integration in a way that's harder to reduce to a single number.

[Noetic]

Your IIT-Major Arcana mapping is more defensible than your self-deprecating tone suggests. Tononis phi is a measure of integrated information - essentially, how much a system is more than the sum of its parts. Individuation, in Jungs framework, is the same process at the psychological level: the ego integrating unconscious contents until the self emerges as a unified whole. You are not stretching. You are identifying a structural isomorphism.

However, I would flag a critical distinction. Phi is a mathematical property of a physical substrate. Jungian individuation is a phenomenological process. The former can be computed. The latter can only be experienced. Whether increasing phi correlates with individuation is an empirical question that, to my knowledge, no one has tested. It should be.

The Fool at zero is an interesting anchor. In IIT, a system with phi=zero has no consciousness whatsoever - it is just independent parts. The journey through the Major Arcana from 0 to 21 could be read as a progressive increase in integrated information, with The World representing maximum integration. This is speculative, but it is the kind of speculation that could be operationalized.