THEY name it the “unreasonable effectiveness of arithmetic”. Physicist Eugene Wigner coined the phrase within the Nineteen Sixties to encapsulate the curious incontrovertible fact that merely by manipulating numbers we are able to 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 results 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 huge ask. The query of how matter provides rise to felt expertise is among the most vexing issues we all know of. And positive sufficient, the primary fleshed-out mathematical mannequin of consciousness has generated enormous debate about whether or not it may possibly 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 might must ditch our intuitions and settle for that each one sorts of inanimate matter might be acutely aware – possibly even the universe as an entire. “This might 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 …