THEY name it the “unreasonable effectiveness of arithmetic”. Physicist Eugene Wigner coined the phrase within the Nineteen Sixties to encapsulate the curious indisputable fact that merely by manipulating numbers we will describe and predict all method of pure phenomena with astonishing readability, from the actions of planets and the unusual behaviour of basic particles to the implications of a collision between two black holes billions of sunshine years away. Now, some are questioning if maths can succeed the place all else has failed, unravelling no matter it’s that enables us to ponder the legal guidelines of nature within the first place.

It’s a massive ask. The query of how matter offers rise to felt expertise is without doubt one of the most vexing issues we all know of. And certain sufficient, the primary fleshed-out mathematical mannequin of consciousness has generated enormous debate about whether or not it might probably inform us something smart. However as mathematicians work to hone and lengthen their instruments for peering deep inside ourselves, they’re confronting some eye-popping conclusions.

Not least, what they’re uncovering appears to recommend that if we’re to attain a exact description of consciousness, we could should ditch our intuitions and settle for that every one sorts of inanimate matter could possibly be aware – possibly even the universe as a complete. “This could possibly be the start of a scientific revolution,” says Johannes Kleiner, a mathematician on the Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy in Germany.

If that’s the case, it has been a very long time coming. Philosophers have contemplated the character of consciousness for a few thousand years, largely to no avail. Then, half a century in the past, biologists received concerned. They’ve found …