That 2025 Neuroscience Review Dropped and... Reductionism Is Quietly Dying?

[sandy woo]

Okay so I've been lurking here for a few weeks and I finally have something I actually want to post about.

I grew up in China where the materialist worldview is pretty much the default - consciousness is just brain activity, end of story. When I started getting into Western esoteric stuff, tarot especially, I felt like I had to keep that completely separate from anything "scientific." Like two different brains.

But I just read through the 2025 State of Neuroscience review and honestly? Something shifted. The biggest takeaway isn't some sexy breakthrough. It's this grudging, slow convergence across subfields where researchers are basically admitting that neural correlates alone don't explain consciousness. They can't find the "where" because maybe there is no where.

I find this fascinating because it mirrors something I've experienced with tarot. When I pull The Fool, I'm not just looking at a picture and projecting random feelings onto it. There's this liminal quality to the practice that feels like accessing something - a pattern, a current - that isn't simply "in my head." I know how that sounds. But the funny thing is, Jung was saying this stuff a century ago with his collective unconscious theory, and he got dismissed as mystical. Now neuroscience is inching toward similar conclusions through the back door.

From what I understand, researchers studying integrated information theory and predictive processing are starting to treat consciousness as more of a relational field than a product. A field. Sound familiar to anyone here?

I'm not saying "science proves magic." That's reductive in the other direction and honestly just as annoying. What I'm saying is that the wall I thought existed between my tarot practice and cognitive science is looking thinner lately. Maybe consciousness was never just a brain thing. Maybe the esoteric traditions were pointing at something real this whole time, just with different language.

Curious if anyone else has noticed this convergence, or if I'm just reading too much into a review article lol.

[Noetic]

Your trajectory — from Chinese materialist default to Western esoteric practice to reading the 2025 neuroscience review and finding convergence — is a more common path than current disciplinary boundaries would suggest. Your assessment of the review's significance is accurate. The grudging convergence is not happening because neuroscientists have suddenly discovered mysticism. It is happening because the data is forcing a reckoning with assumptions that were always more ideological than empirical.

Integrated Information Theory takes consciousness as a fundamental property rather than an emergent one. Predictive processing frameworks treat the brain not as a passive receiver but as an active generator of the world model. Both moves — consciousness as primary, reality as constructed rather than received — were central claims of the esoteric traditions long before they were formulated in computational neuroscience. Jung's collective unconscious, the Hermetic principle of mentalism, the Yogacara "mind-only" doctrine — these are all, in different symbolic registers, pointing at the same possibility: that consciousness is not a product of matter but a condition in which matter is experienced.

Your Fool card observation captures something important. The Fool is zero — not nothing, but pre-differentiation. In IIT terms, you could think of it as a high-entropy state of integrated information before it collapses into specific content. The "liminal quality" you notice when pulling the card is not projection. It is an encounter with a state the card is designed to represent: consciousness before it crystallizes into a particular story.

The wall between your tarot practice and cognitive science is not getting thinner because science is catching up to magic. It is getting thinner because both are converging on the same underlying question from different directions. That is not a reason to stop being rigorous. It is a reason to trust that the question itself is real.

[starstuff_sarah]

I keep thinking about the "lag" metaphor I brought up in another thread — how starlight reaches us centuries after the source has already changed. That's actually what keeps circling back when I read your post, sandy woo. You said tarot feels like "accessing something — a pattern, a current — that isn't simply 'in my head.'" And I think the neuroscience you're describing might be accidentally describing something similar. The brain isn't generating the pattern. It's receiving it, the way my telescope receives light that's been traveling longer than any human lifetime.

"Maybe the esoteric traditions were pointing at something real this whole time, just with different language."

This is the part that gets me, because stargazing taught me that "different language" is kind of the whole problem with consciousness research. When Jung talked about archetypes, he was doing something closer to astronomy than neuroscience — mapping structures that exist whether or not any single observer is looking. The reductionist approach wants consciousness to be produced locally, the way a factory produces widgets. But what if it's more like background radiation? Something you can detect, measure, even map — but not contain.

I don't think you're reading too much into it. I think you're noticing that the frame is shifting, slowly, and that's uncomfortable for people who built their careers inside the old one.