Great essay thank you. I quote two interesting parts from your essay:
"Numbers do not exist. But one fine day, feeling my oats, I kick and encounter a boundary or wall. Now there is self and not-self: 0 and 1. You know where it goes from there - separation and numbers: my hand, my feet, my birth, my mother, my blanket, and my cookies, all the way to my political identity."
And,
"We derive mental structures using pattern recognition capabilities of neural networks, and mark places with coordinate numbers, based on the neural networks ability to implement counters [5]. Physicists are the world's experts in projecting complex mental structures (as math) onto physical reality. Yet either one seamless reality exists, or the universe is simply a sum of disjointed parts, which have no conceivable reason for "hanging together" in such elegant and enduring fashion. Rovelli: "... evidence is strong that nature is unitary and coherent." How do we decide which is the case?"
Reading these points with the narrowing down in my essay, I now have some thoughts on what consciousness might be:
1. The mind is numbers (consciousness/intention) that emerge from number structures (life), which generate them (hence brain to mind causation). There are also number structures that that don't produce emerging numbers (non life), but upon certain arrangement they can become number structures and generate numbers.
2. We can describe the mind by the numbers that emerge from the number structures (that is the mind describing what its like to have a mind) or by the number structures themselves (the brain causes the mind). This is possible because equivalence exists; precisely because the numbers generated fit the structures that generate them.
Of course, two people of different structures generating different numbers, in environments of different numbers, are bound to have 'differences of opinion.'
3. So I think this would be possible to describe. We need a simple life form, we depict how it generates numbers from its structure, and we see its mind in the numbers it generates (via equivalence) and then what is around this life is also number structures, the sum interaction with which is the underpinning of evolution.
4. So for example, you have a structure that is a set of points, a number of numbers that is its mind that follows from those points, and then other structures that surround it. The points are equivalent mathematically to the number structure, but the points are part of a larger system that has interactions (physics), so those points change/move, and the numbers of mind change in the moment.
5. So what is consciousness? It is the numbers of a number structure and the surrounding numbers structures and non number structures influencing that structure. We just need to be able to describe how number structures produce numbers. But this is interesting for we have equivalence. So we must describe the physical brain interms of points or networks etc, that produce other numbers (of mind), that are equal to those structures.
6. So we need some equal languages:
a. Non life number structures, which can result in;
b. Life Number structures, which result in;
c. Numbers of mind, which match a. and can also produce;
d. Language, the concepts of which would be equal to c. and acute in description of c. Indeed this is why science is so hard, because using d. to describe a or b is to miss the level of equivalent translations via b.
Will rate your essay very highly, thank you.