This is one of the deepest and most original pieces of thinking I’ve read on Medium, so thank you very much for writing it, and for putting your ideas out in the forum. I agree with your point 100%, and highlighted many places in your piece where it especially resonated. To do some “active listening” I’d reflect your point as “human thought is a fiction we invent for our purposes, and the fact that some of these fictions ‘work’ better than others is a matter of degree and not of kind.”

One way or another, it’d be great to see your point made more definitively. One could still argue our abstractions are still true in the sense that they are abstractions of direct experience. Did we invent number? Or did we simply abstract from our experience? The “truth” of addition is never violated because in some sense our abstraction is true to “reality.” But still, as you say, the power of our abstraction doesn’t mean we discovered some big secret. The “order” of things can be entirely “accidental” and signals no “divine” intervention or design.

Imagine if we saw water in a jar of invisible glass. It’d look like water floating in the air! The religious might see a miracle. Scientists might deduce the mathematics of the shape of the water as it floated in air, and think they had discovered and defined a new force of physics. But if the jar suddenly became visible, it’d be nothing extraordinary at all. The “floating water” would immediately be natural and intuitive. We just needed to see the glass to “understand” the “mystery.”

In other words, as you said, there’s no reason to believe we perceive all of reality. If we perceived more, the miracle of mathematics, and all the head-scratching we do over it, might vanish altogether.