Is Mind Created By Mathematics?
Maryann Miller, Msc.D.
I recently read an ar
ticle about mathematics being the creator of mind. Well, that really sparked my curiosity because I was also recently watching a YouTube video with Robert Edward Grant on his mathematical equations creating The Architect, which he states can access the 5th, 6th, and even 7th Dimensions. I’ve been a student of metaphysics for over fifty-four years and during that time, I’ve studied consciousness from, I thought, every angle. However, mathematical equations creating the mind is a new concept to me. So, of course my curiosity got into gear and I’ve been researching this ever since, and this is what I’ve found.
For centuries, scientists believed that if you kept breaking matter down into smaller and smaller pieces, you’d eventually discover the fundamental stuff that everything is made of. Ancient Greek philosophers called these basic building blocks atoms, literally meaning uncuttable. They imagined them as tiny, solid particles with definite shapes.
As our technology advanced and we delved deeper into matter, we made a startling discovery. Atoms aren’t solid at all; they can be split into protons, neutrons, and electrons. Go deeper, and those particles break down into quarks and other subatomic particles. Keep going, and eventually you reach a level where there’s nothing solid left at all. At the most fundamental level, what we find are mathematical descriptions of energy fields, probability waves, and abstract relationships. The particles that make up everything are more like patterns of information than tiny solid objects.
This discovery created a major puzzle: If everything is ultimately made of abstract, non-physical information at the deepest level, why does the world feel so concrete and solid to us? Why can you feel the weight of a book in your hands or the hardness of a car’s steering wheel?
Some physicists, like Max Tegmark, argue that only the mathematical structures and information patterns are truly real. According to this view, everything we experience, including our own minds, emerges from pure information processing. Matter, consciousness, and even our sense of being alive are illusions created by abstract mathematical relationships.
Traditional Information Processing
In traditional information processing, when we talk about information processing, we understand it requires something to do the processing, like a computer with circuits, or a brain with neurons. The information exists as patterns in these physical systems.
Pure Information Processing
Information realists propose that the processing itself can exist without any physical hardware or conscious mind to run it. They think mathematical operations happen by themselves, computational rules execute themselves automatically, data transforms according to algorithms, and everything occurs in some abstract realm without any actual processor.
However, pure information processing creates what philosophers call a category error. It’s like claiming that a song can play without any instrument, a computer program can run without a computer or mathematics can compute itself without any mathematical mind. In their view, information processing requires someone or something to do the processing as well as rules for how to process, in other word, algorithms or logic.
The problem lies with the fact that pure information processing tries to eliminate someone or something to do the processing, i.e., the mind or processor, while keeping data/information and algorithms/logic. However, this is logically illogical. You can’t have processing without a processor, just like you can’t have thinking without a thinker.
So the real issue is that the concept becomes so abstract and undefined that it explains nothing while appearing to explain everything, thus making it essentially meaningless despite sounding scientific. But this raises a critical question: What exactly is information if there’s no physical system to store it and no mind to interpret it? It’s like claiming that computer software can exist without any computer hardware to run it, or that a story can exist without anyone to read it or tell it.
An alternative explanation suggests that physics is pointing us toward mind or consciousness as the fundamental basis of reality. Instead of trying to explain consciousness as emerging from matter, this view proposes that what we call matter is actually how consciousness appears to us when we observe it. Think of it this way: In virtual reality, everything feels solid and real while you’re experiencing it, but it’s all generated by information processing. Similarly, maybe the physical world is how a cosmic or universal consciousness experiences itself, with the mathematical laws of physics being the programming code of Universal Consciousness.
This doesn’t suggest that you’re imagining everything yourself or that reality is just your personal fantasy. Instead, it proposes that there’s a transpersonal field of consciousness, like a Cosmic or Universal Mind that we all participate in. When our individual awareness interacts with this larger consciousness, we experience it as the solid, predictable physical world. This explains why mathematics is so effective at describing nature: if reality is fundamentally mental, then of course mathematical thinking would be the perfect tool for understanding it.
This makes scientific sense because the qualities we associate with matter (solidity, sound, smell, weight, and texture) are actually experiences created by our five senses interacting with energy, not properties that exist in abstract mathematical equations themselves. These sensory experiences happen in consciousness, not in mathematical formulas or energy fields.
Modern physics keeps breaking matter down into smaller and smaller pieces, and what scientists find at the deepest level isn’t solid stuff at all but abstract mathematical patterns and probabilities that require a conscious observer to become real. Instead of assuming these patterns are more real than our actual lived experiences, we might need to flip our thinking: perhaps consciousness (the awareness of having these experiences) is what’s actually fundamental to reality.
This represents a dramatic shift in understanding. Rather than believing consciousness mysteriously appears when matter becomes complex enough (like a brain), we’re discovering that consciousness might actually come first, with everything else (including matter itself) arising from it. This doesn’t reject science; it’s simply following where scientific discoveries are pointing us. The mathematical patterns that physics reveals may actually be describing a mental universe, because mathematics itself only exists in conscious minds capable of thinking abstractly. In other words, the universe might be more like a thought than like a machine.
As modern physics meets the ageless wisdom, we arrive at something remarkable: we’re not tiny, separate bits of awareness lost in a lifeless, mechanical cosmos. Instead, we are expressions of a universal creative intelligence experiencing itself through countless forms. From this perspective, every scientific breakthrough is actually the universe becoming more aware of itself. It’s consciousness discovering its own nature through the very minds that make such discoveries possible. What science is revealing, then, is not a universe that accidentally produced consciousness, but consciousness recognizing itself as the creative source of all that exists.
I have a little saying taped to my computer monitor so I can read and remember it often. It goes like this: “You are not here in your physical body striving to achieve the Non-Physical, for you are not separate from what is Non-Physical. You are an extension – a leading edge extension – of that Non Physical Energy. You are not here on planet Earth trying to get back to what is Non-Physical, but instead, you are summoning the Non-Physical outward to where you are. And in that summoning, All That Is expands, and your summoning is the reason for the expansion.”
This is the beauty and power of our journey. We are not here to escape the physical, but to infuse it with the light of conscious presence. Each breath, each moment of wonder, and each question that leads us deeper into the mystery is part of a grand unfolding. We are not separate from Source, we are how Source moves, feels, and awakens through form. The universe is not out there, distant and cold. It is here, alive within us, listening, responding, and expanding through every spark of awareness we bring to it. And so, with open hearts and curious minds, we continue the great remembering: that we are the cosmos, come awake in human form.