As ought to be clear from manmade mathematics, consciousness and agency are necessary component parts of manmade mathematics. Consciousness and agency, together with the manmade mathematical symbols, model a mathematical system.
The point-of-view aspect of the world that knows/ is aware of the mathematical situation represented by the symbols, and the agentic aspect of the world that initiates and reinitiates movement in the mathematical symbols in response to this knowledge/ awareness, together with the symbols themselves, are the ONLY meta-model we have of a mathematical system.
And we can conclude from the above meta-model that basic-level consciousness and agency are necessary component parts of the real-world mathematical system: what is represented by the symbols is not sufficient to comprise a viable, moving mathematical system. These symbols represent the following aspects of the real world: 1) categories like relative position; 2) “law of nature” relationships between the categories that are represented by equations; and 3) numbers that apply to the categories. What is represented by these symbols is not sufficient to comprise a viable, moving real-world mathematical system.
We are talking about the real-world moving mathematical system that underlies everything, including planets, living organisms, and computers/ AIs.
What seems to underlie the world is not so much actual things or actual matter, but aspects of things or matter: categories, relationships and numbers, and the aspect that knows and analyses the categories, relationships and numbers, and the aspect that initiates movement in the categories, relationships and numbers in response to this knowledge/ analysis. So, for example, the delta symbols found in the “law of nature” equations symbolically represent a basic-level knowledge and analysis of a situation.
In living organisms, all these basic-level aspects of the world are utilised and built up into higher levels, where the basic-level aspects are: categories, relationships and numbers; the aspect that knows and analyses; and the aspect that initiates movement.
However, in computers/ AIs, it is clear that there is not much more than the low-level categories (e.g. the voltage category), low-level relationships and numbers, low levels of the aspect that knows and analyses, and low levels of the aspect that initiates movement. The low-level aspects of the world that allow computers/ AIs to function are a separate issue to the fact that people are utilising these aspects of the world (voltages, transistors and circuits ) to represent and process manmade symbols.
