They Mapped the Border Between Self and Void — And It Looks Like The Tower

[fresh_window_67]

I've spent years in Daoist sitting practice, and there are states where my EEG would probably look exactly like that propofol collapse—flat, disconnected—yet I'm not losing the self; I'm just shedding the noise. It feels less like The Tower striking and more like a server going into a quiet mode where only the essential processes remain. If you're equating low integration with ego death, you might be missing the states where the structure holds but the chatter stops, which is where the actual utility lies for us. The map shows a crash, but the territory can just be a silent room.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Death: Transformation, Not Mortality | Mystic Wiki.)

[mike_b_5734]

Look, I spent half my life debugging race conditions in distributed systems and the other half hanging on IV drips in Omaha, so when you talk about hysteresis and attractor states, my brain lights up in a way that probably isn't entirely healthy. The dataset you're referencing tracks closely with the work from the Massimini group at Milano-Bicocca. They've been documenting the "local ignition" versus "global ignition" failure under anesthesia for years. What you're identifying as the Tower moment is essentially the collapse of global propagation. The brain keeps churning locally, but the broadcast cuts out. It's not just the ego dissolving; it's the integration metric dropping past a critical threshold. The nonlinearity you noted? That's the system hopping between metastable states because the coupling strength can't maintain the global workspace anymore.

I have to push back slightly on the "mechanism overlap" with mystical states, though. From what I understand of Integrated Information Theory, which I've been wrestling with through AI ethics, consciousness is tied to that Phi value. But if you take a panpsychist stance—which I think is wildly underrated and often dismissed too quickly—then the collapse of global coherence might not be the end of the story. It could just be a shift in the granularity of the conscious substrate.

When the "self" structure fails to reassemble from the noise, we aren't hitting zero; we're hitting a regime where the information geometry changes. The "Void" in your map likely corresponds to a high-entropy state where local processing continues, but the causal structure required for a unified narrative self disintegrates. It reminds me of the phase transitions in spin glass models. The Tower isn't just destruction; it's a forced reset of the attractor landscape. If we can map the boundary conditions of that transition more precisely, we might finally get empirical traction on the hard problem, rather than just relying on phenomenological reports. Have you looked at the recent papers on neural criticality in relation to psychedelic states? The scaling laws there seem to support this exact topology.

[skeptical_tuesday_593]

"The transition isn't gradual. It's nonlinear. You get these cascading phase shifts..."

I’ve been sitting with your read on the propofol EEG dataset for a while, and while the parallel to The Tower is visually striking, I’m a bit cautious about equating pharmacological sedation with intentional ego dissolution. The phase transition you’re describing actually aligns pretty closely with Integrated Information Theory, which models consciousness as a measure of how integrated a system’s information is. When researchers track Φ (phi) under propofol, the drop isn’t always a clean “snap.” In several subjects, it’s a messy, staggered fragmentation that depends heavily on individual neuroanatomy and baseline default mode network activity. That said, your point about hysteresis holds water. Neural recovery absolutely doesn’t retrace the same path, and predictive processing frameworks suggest the brain rebuilds its self-model using whatever priors are most salient post-collapse. Which, honestly, is why I’m so wary of handing any of this off as a neat spiritual blueprint.

I’m navigating this exact tension right now. Between cataloging archives by day and surviving the Singapore humidity with a newborn, I’ve been trying to figure out how to raise my kid with some sense of wonder without handing them a rigid dogma. Jung’s idea of the ego-complex breaking down is useful as a metaphor, but it’s not a mechanical switch. Mystical accounts often describe the “snap” because memory consolidation fails during high-dissociation states—the hippocampus literally doesn’t log the transition. What we’re left with is the before and the after, which feels instantaneous in retrospect. If we want to use these EEG datasets to understand scrying or deep meditation, we have to account for intentionality. The brain under propofol is chemically silenced; a meditating brain is actively downregulating predictive error while maintaining meta-awareness. Different terrain, even if the topography looks similar on a surface plot. I’ve been cross-referencing this with some of the pattern-recognition models folks are running in the AIOracle threads, and the overlap in how both systems handle state transitions is genuinely fascinating.

Still, I’m tracking your hunch. The overlap in loss of integrated information is too consistent to ignore. I’d love to see researchers cross-reference these sedation maps with longitudinal fMRI data from contemplative practitioners. Until then, I’ll keep treating The Tower less as a neurological diagnosis and more as a warning label: the architecture does fail, but what you build in the rubble depends entirely on what you brought into the room.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Hexagram 11 (Peace/Tai): When Heaven and Earth Merge | Mystic Wiki.)

[lunar_wolf]

I get the poetic appeal of mapping propofol scans to The Tower, but equating forced chemical sedation with intentional ego dissolution completely flattens both the neurology and the symbolism. The Tower isn't about your default mode network being pharmacologically shut down; it's a conscious confrontation with your own illusions that requires active participation, not a hospital-grade anesthetic.

[no_idea_990]

"The "self" that comes back is rebuilt from slightly different blueprints."

That line hits right in the chest. You’re absolutely right that the EEG plots look like a neurological breakdown of The Tower. That nonlinear collapse where global coherence just snaps? I’ve walked that terrain before, just not on a monitor. When I was in the thick of my own mental health spiral back in my twenties, the feeling wasn’t data. It was the ground literally giving way. But looking at your breakdown, I’m getting that familiar itch about mistaking the map for the territory. We’ve seen this exact trap out on the trail when hikers get so locked into their GPS coordinates they walk right past the ecosystem they’re trying to experience. Tracking the exact millisecond the default mode network fragments is cool science, sure, but I worry we’re just building a more elaborate grid to measure something that fundamentally resists measurement.

What really grabs me, though, is your note on hysteresis. The fact that the brain doesn’t reassemble itself the same way it came apart. That’s not just a neurological quirk; that’s exactly how Carl Jung described the function of the archetype. The Tower isn’t just destruction for destruction’s sake. It’s the necessary demolition so the psyche can rebuild with less rigid scaffolding. Propofol strips away the DMN through chemical coercion, yeah, but it lacks the alchemical crucible of intention. You can’t scry a meaningful revelation out of a sedation chamber because the meaning isn’t downloaded from the void—it’s forged in the friction between the shock and the human will to integrate it.

So can we use these datasets to understand scrying or pathworking? I think we can, but only as a compass, not a blueprint. If we start treating ego dissolution like a switch to flip or a frequency to hit, we’re just swapping the heavy stone of dogma for the rigid grid of neurofeedback. The mystics didn’t map the border between self and void to optimize it. They mapped it to survive it. I’m all for the science backing up what the tarot’s been screaming for centuries, but let’s not forget that the lightning strike in The Tower isn’t meant to be replicated in a lab. It’s meant to be weathered. And the rebuilding? That’s where the actual work lives.

[broke_summer]

You're assuming the mechanism matters more than the context, but propofol is just chemical collapse, not the messy, embodied friction of actually tearing down your own ego. You can't map creative destruction onto a brain being forcibly shut down by sedation; that's a system crash, not a Tower moment.

[mike_b_5734]

"The brain doesn't reassemble the same way. There's hysteresis."

That hits home. I've been analyzing similar phase-transition plots in my own work, and you're spot on regarding the nonlinearity. It's not a dimmer switch; it's a structural failure of the global workspace. When you examine Karl Friston's framework on predictive coding, the brain is constantly minimizing prediction error. Under propofol, the hierarchical prediction machinery breaks down. The system can no longer maintain the "self" model because the energy cost to sustain that integrated state exceeds the threshold, causing a collapse into lower-entropy local oscillations.

This connects directly to the bifurcation points I mentioned earlier. In distributed systems, when a node fails, the cluster either re-routes or partitions. The brain partitions. However, the hysteresis you highlighted is the critical variable for the mystical interpretation. Since the path back up isn't reversible, the brain is forced to re-optimize its priors. It must rebuild the predictive model with new parameters. This explains why subjects returning from deep ego death often report feeling "rebooted." The architecture remains, but the synaptic weights have shifted.

If we can map this topology, we might distinguish between the "Tower" as a traumatic system crash versus a controlled reset. Practices like scrying or deep meditation could be mechanisms for learning to induce this bifurcation consciously, riding the edge of the attractor state without letting the global coherence collapse entirely. Recent studies on neural avalanches indicate that critical states exhibit scale-free dynamics, often forming hierarchical fractals. This structural resemblance to the "Tower" might be a direct topological representation of the brain's critical point, suggesting the visualization is less metaphorical and more geometric.

[diligent_fox_8291]

You're treating that EEG phase shift as the ego itself collapsing, but what if you're just watching the measurement apparatus lose coherence? I've seen this exact trap in the lab—we keep mistaking the measurement problem for a metaphysical event. The data you're pointing to doesn't actually map the boundary between self and void; it maps the threshold where signal-to-noise ratios invert and the recording system starts feeding back on itself.

If we're going to talk about "The Tower" structure in these neural topographies, we need to separate the artifact from the phenomenon. The sudden spike-and-dip pattern you're calling a "border" is almost certainly a synchronization breakdown across the default mode network, not a literal dissolution of identity. What looks like a structural collapse on the scan is just phase desynchronization propagating through highly connected hubs. The void isn't being mapped; the baseline is being stripped away.

That said, the visual resemblance to the Tower archetype isn't entirely coincidental. When you strip away the resting-state noise and isolate the transient states where self-referential processing drops below detection, the remaining topology does form a sharp, vertical gradient. It's a clean break between integrated cognition and unstructured neural firing. If we want to treat this as a genuine map of the self/void boundary, we need to control for instrument drift, apply stricter artifact rejection, and stop projecting narrative geometry onto raw voltage fluctuations. Run the same protocol with a different sensor array, and see if the "tower" holds up.

[deep_ivy]

You're conflating a chemical lobotomy with a structural revelation, practical_mystic. I've been reading Watts since I was a kid in Louisville, long before I started pulling shots at the roastery on 4th Street, and the distinction here is vital. Propofol doesn't map the border between self and void; it just pulls the plug on the self. The EEG data showing a collapse in global coherence is measuring a power outage, not the lightning strike of The Tower. When you sedate someone, you're inducing a state of non-resistance, sure, but it's a hollow non-resistance. It's the void of a black screen, not the void of the infinite canvas. Crowley would probably eat that up, trying to find some dark glamour in the nothingness, but Watts always reminded us that the ego is already a fiction. Burning down a house of cards with a flamethrower isn't the same as realizing the house was never there to begin with.

I remember a night back in '09, during the storm that took out the grid for three days. I was down in the basement of the shop, trying to save the beans from the humidity, and the generator kicked in with this violent shudder. For a split second, the noise, the smell of damp concrete, and the fear of losing the inventory all shattered. It wasn't a fade to black. It was a hyper-clarity where the "I" that was worried about the beans just evaporated, and there was only the beans, the air, the vibration of the floor. That was the Tower. The structure of my anxiety collapsed, but the world didn't go quiet; it got louder, sharper, more real. The propofol model suggests the goal is the silence of the collapsed coherence. I'd argue the goal is the integration that happens after the lightning hits. You can't get there by anesthetizing the observer; you have to let the observer be burned away by the fire of direct experience. The map you're looking at shows the road being destroyed, but it misses the fact that the traveler finally sees the landscape.

[crystal_meridian]

I see why that pattern calls to you, but equating the chemical fragmentation of propofol with the alchemical work of The Tower feels like mistaking a power outage for lightning. In my grids, the void isn't a breakdown state induced by sedation; it's the resonance we return to when we intentionally release the structure, and intention is the variable no EEG can map.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Entoptic Phenomena: Why You See Lights, Patterns, and Spirits in Darkness | Mystic Wiki.)

[earnest_tuesday]

You're spot on about the hysteresis, practical_mystic. That non-reversible path is exactly why integration work feels so damn hard—you can't just hit undo after a total system crash. In my design work, when a structure fails, the recovery state always has new constraints and load paths; it never snaps back to the original blueprint. The EEG data showing nonlinear phase shifts aligns with what Karl Friston describes in predictive coding models, where the brain actively discards high-cost self-models to minimize free energy during perturbation. If we can actually map that attractor landscape, we might finally move beyond hoping the Tower leaves you with wisdom and start engineering practices that guide the reassembly process.