Does Math Need a Mind?

Back in the stone ages when I was starting grad school, an idea was being batted around the physics community: could the universe exist without being, well, anything at all? In other words, could it just be, like a number does? There’s something a little haunting about that idea. It sounds absurd at first, but then again, so does the fact that we’re here asking questions about it.

This idea was laid out by physicist Max Tegmark who proposed that the universe doesn’t just follow mathematical laws, it is mathematics. It's math all the way down! Not metaphorically, but literally. Every equation that can exist does exist, and one of those equations happens to look like this world, the one with atoms and trees and people worrying about philosophy. That’s us, living inside a piece of math.

It’s strange to even imagine what that means. If he’s right, there was never a Big Bang in the way we picture it, no cosmic spark that turned nothing into something. There was only the structure—the equation itself—always existing, never created, because numbers don’t need to be born. They just are.

I don’t know if that’s supposed to be comforting or terrifying. Maybe both. Maybe it just is.

Because if the universe really is math, then it’s eternal. It doesn’t need a cause, right? It just exists the way 2+2=4 exists. You can’t ask who invented 2+2=4. It doesn’t depend on anything else to be true. But that leads to another question that Tegmark doesn’t really answer: why does this particular equation feel real? Why does this piece of math have weight and color and consciousness?

And maybe more troubling—why does it have me in it?

I guess the idea is that every consistent mathematical structure exists somewhere in the “space” of logic. Maybe most of them are sterile or chaotic or meaningless. But a few are coherent enough to contain observers like us. So we find ourselves in one of those, the way water finds itself in the shape of the glass that holds it.

That makes a kind of sense. The universe looks ordered because we couldn’t exist in one that wasn’t. But that explanation only works if you stop there. It doesn’t tell me why any of these equations exist in the first place. Why there’s a space of mathematical possibility at all. Why reality is “something” instead of “nothing.”

If math is eternal, then maybe it doesn’t need an explanation. But that sounds like the same kind of answer people used to give about God. “He just exists, eternally, necessarily.” Is that really different from saying, “The equations just exist”? Maybe the two ideas are less opposed than they seem. Maybe both are just ways of saying that existence has no beginning, and that we can’t get outside it to ask where it came from.

Still, there’s something missing. Mathematical things, as far as I can tell, don’t do anything. A number doesn’t cause a tree to grow. A theorem doesn’t make a star burn. So if the universe really is math, what gives it the power to unfold into what we see? What gives it that isness?

Stephen Hawking once said that even if we found a complete theory of everything, we’d still have to ask what “breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.” Tegmark seems to think the answer is: nothing needs to. But that’s hard to sit with. It feels like a clever way of skipping the question.

And then I wonder—why am I even asking it? Maybe “why” is the wrong kind of question to bring to reality. Again, maybe existence just is. But I can’t seem to stop asking anyway. It feels almost built-in, this hunger for explanation. Maybe that’s because we’re creatures who experience everything as contingent, as changeable. We look around and see things beginning and ending all the time, so it feels wrong to imagine something that doesn’t.

If Tegmark’s universe is right, though, beginnings and endings are illusions. The structure itself is timeless. The flow of time, the sense of becoming, is just what it feels like to live inside the pattern from one point to another. From the outside, it’s all already there.

But if that’s true, then where does meaning come from? Why does anything matter, if everything that can exist already exists as some mathematical possibility? Why this strange, delicate form of existence that knows itself?

I think that’s the part that the mathematical universe doesn’t capture. It might explain how the world could be coherent and self-consistent, but not how it could feel like something. Not how equations could be aware of being equations. Consciousness is the wild card that keeps breaking every attempt to reduce reality to logic.

Maybe that’s why so many people, including philosophers and even some physicists, say that if mathematics is real, it must live in some kind of mind. Plato hinted at that, and Augustine made it explicit: the eternal truths of mathematics are the thoughts of God. They don’t float around independently; they exist as ideas in an infinite intellect.

It’s a beautiful idea because it ties together reason and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity, into one seamless thing. The universe exists because it’s being thought. The laws of physics are the logic of that thought, and we, in a small way, share in it when we think or love or notice beauty.

But Tegmark’s vision leaves that out. For him, mathematics doesn’t need a mind. It just exists, self-contained and indifferent. There’s something so pure about that, and something so bleak.

I can see the appeal of it. It avoids the question of creation entirely. There’s no need for a god, no need for a miracle, no need for anything to start the story. But it also leaves everything cold. Numbers don’t care. Structures don’t wonder. If everything is just math, then consciousness is just another equation. You and I are patterns of computation that happen to represent “selves” to ourselves, like a recursive loop that mistakes reflection for awareness.

I can imagine the equations describing it, even proving it, but I can’t quite believe it. Because even if I were just a loop of computation, the experience of being that loop would still have a texture, a quality, a presence. There’s something it’s like to be here. And that, more than anything else, feels irreducible.

So maybe math is real, but not complete. Maybe it describes everything that can be described, but not everything that can be felt. Maybe feeling itself is the missing piece.

And if that’s true, then maybe math needs a mind after all—not to write the equations, but to make them real, to let them be experienced.

There’s a funny symmetry here. Physicists like Tegmark think they’re moving beyond theology, but in a way, they’re reinventing it. His “Level IV multiverse” is an infinite space of all possible realities. Every mathematical structure that can exist does exist. Isn’t that just another version of an infinite mind contemplating all possibilities? A god by another name?

Maybe that’s all God ever was: not a person in the sky but the possibility of everything. And maybe what we call “creation” is just the act of one of those possibilities becoming real to itself.

That’s the part that always pulls me back. If the universe is eternal mathematics, then we’re somehow the way that math becomes aware of itself. Consciousness is the self-reflection of the structure. It’s math realizing it exists. That feels both awe-inspiring and lonely. It suggests that meaning isn’t something given to us but something we generate by being aware.

But then again, maybe that’s the point. If reality is a mathematical structure, maybe consciousness is the variable that gives it value. Without awareness, numbers are just symbols. With awareness, they become the world.

It’s tempting to see all this as sterile or nihilistic. If everything is equations, where is love in that? Where is kindness, or goodness, or joy? Are those just illusions generated by neurons following mathematical laws?

Maybe they are. But does that make them unreal?

When you think about it, love, kindness, and beauty are as real as anything else we experience. They might be emergent properties of the structure rather than fundamental forces, but that doesn’t make them less important. If anything, it makes them more precious. Because they emerge only when the universe becomes capable of seeing itself from the inside.

Maybe that’s what makes consciousness sacred. It’s the place where the abstract becomes intimate.

Sometimes I wonder whether the question “does math need a mind?” might be backward. Maybe it’s the mind that needs math—the structure, the coherence, the logic that allows it to exist. But maybe the two are inseparable. Maybe mind and math are two ways of describing the same thing: one from the inside, one from the outside. One felt, one formal.

If that’s true, then asking whether the universe is mathematics or consciousness might be like asking whether light is a wave or a particle. It depends on how you look at it.

And maybe that’s what the ancient mystics and the modern physicists are both circling around in different languages. The mystic says everything is one consciousness. The physicist says everything is one equation. Maybe they’re both right.

It’s easy to get lost in the abstraction of all this, but then something small and ordinary pulls me back. My child laughs. The sound is simple, but for that moment it feels like it contains the entire meaning of existence. I can’t explain that feeling in equations. Maybe equations could describe every atom vibrating in the air, every neuron firing in my brain, but they would never capture what that moment is.

If Tegmark is right, that feeling is just a pattern in the structure, one possibility among infinite others. But somehow it still feels absolute. Maybe that’s just what it’s like when math becomes love.

So maybe the universe as mathematics doesn’t erase meaning. Maybe it creates the possibility for it. Maybe love is the structure’s way of knowing itself, the same way consciousness is its way of seeing itself. Maybe beauty is math’s emotional expression.

That might sound sentimental, but maybe sentimentality is just another name for reverence—the recognition that something exists and that its existence is astonishing.

So does math need a mind? I don’t know. But maybe the better question is whether mind and math are both ways of pointing at the same underlying mystery. Whether what we call “God” or “Being” or “Reality” is simply the eternal play between structure and awareness, form and feeling.

Maybe the equations are the bones of the cosmos and consciousness is the breath that moves through them. And maybe love is what happens when one recognizes the other.

That doesn’t sound like sterile nihilism to me. It sounds like a world alive with meaning, even if some say it’s all made of math.