[smif]

That is one position, but here's the thing though - how does something like "F = ma" enter into your mind in the first place? It first has to enter your consciousness right? And then maybe you might need to make a focused effort of grappling with it to understand what the symbols and implications of that equation mean before you sort of internalize it?

Maybe one line of inquiry that might be able to give us some clues is if we're able to actually have people learn something like a physics equation with no prior knowledge of it while they aren't conscious of the learning of it. That might be a hard study to do with possible ethical concerns but if there's a way to design it, I could see some hope for getting closer to understanding the role/structure of consciousness.

One maybe plausible explanation might be that there's some sort of hierarchy of pattern matching there, where first you need to understand language, then mathematical language, then finally the physics equations. If you take that view, then the equations are really just extremely sophisticated pattern matching constructs. They don't have to actually _be_ the code that makes the universe-computer run so to speak, they just need to give us a precise enough predictive model that we're able to do useful things with it.

Maybe another way to put it is, we're not actually uncovering the source code of the universe, we're just looking at the functioning of the universe and extrapolating our own patterns that yield the greatest predictive power. On that view at least there are some plausble avenues for explaining strange artifacts like the time-reversibility of some equations - i.e. our patterns show that this will give predictions even if time flowed backwards, but the universe's time doesn't flow backwards because this pattern that we found is not the same thing as the actual universe. In that sense we'll never be able to actually uncover this source code so to speak, but that is just how science works - we're always looking for a more accurate theory - we'll never reach "the final theory", and even if we did, how would we know?