[trhway]

>likely originates inside the abstract fuzzy designs that produce elementary consciousness.

that sounds pretty close to what i'm saying - similar brains (and i do think that many animals' brains are much closer to us than we casually think they are) given similar experience (seeing seven stones, seven birds) produce similar constructs (incl. an aggregation/averaging of some aspects of that experience). That doesn't necessarily mean though the real existence of that aggregation/averaging (ie. what we call "number seven"), only the neuron config/sequence what actually encodes it is real.