Although the nature of existence is poorly understood, I tend toward Karl Popper’s “Three Worlds” model, postulating the realms of the physical, the cognitive, and the ideational.1 Consciousness arises from physical (electrochemical) processes, and we can consciously interact with ideas. The questions is whether the physical or ideational is primal or if they require each other. The fact that the physical world runs on what seem to be finely-calibrated relationships and laws is striking, although possibly an accident via cosmological natural selection.2
Whenever I feel that there might be a “mathematician” behind the laws and “just six numbers” that make the cosmos work, I think of what a friend of mine observed about pi, the fact that the ratio behind the beauty and simplicity of a circle is a repeating, irrational number, a number that goes on forever.