> Consciousness, free will, abstract thought, mathematics

- I defined consciousness in a concrete way. it's adaptation to environment based on reinforcement learning and designed by evolution, for survival

- free will - it's just as real as 1000 angels dancing on a pinhead. Nothing is beyond physical. If it has an effect in this world, it's physical. If it doesn't, then it's just fantasy. Philosophers have tried to settle the 'mind body problem' for hundreds of years and finally conceded that dualism is a misguided path. What you consider free will is just randomness (stochastic neural activity) filtered through experience.

- abstract thought - a form of data compression, useful for survival. We use abstractions in order to compress experience in a way that can be applied to novel situations. It would be too difficult to learn the best action for each situation, especially that many situations are novel. So we model the world, compute future outcomes before acting, then act. If it were not so we would never get to learn to drive a car because it would take too many crashes to learn driving the hard way. But we learn to drive without dying 1000 times, and we do many things with few mistakes because we can model in an abstract way the consequences of our current situation and actions.

- mathematics - a useful model we rely on, but it's not absolute. It could be formulated in different ways, the current formulation is not the only possible one, nor is irreducible to matter. It all started when people had more sheep to count than fingers on their hands. The rest is a gradual buildup of model creation.

You are attached to a kind of transcendental thinking which is just too burdensome on Occam's razor. You presuppose much more than necessary. Human experience can be explained by the continuous loop of perception, judgement and action, followed by effects and learning from the outcomes.

Perception is a form of representation of sensorial information in an efficient and useful way. Judgement is the evaluation of the current situation and possible actions (based on instinct and past experience). Acting is just learned reflex controlled by judgement. They are all actually implemented in neural networks. They process information in a loop with the environment.

You don't need any transcendental presupposition to understand consciousness, free will, abstract thought and mathematics. Sorry to be so blunt, but we're evolving past medieval thinking into the bright future of AI, and many things that seemed magical and transcendental have been proven to be just learning (error minimisation).

I have been like you once, a zealot of spiritual thinking. After many decades and life experiences now I have a much better way to grasp the situation. I don't rely on magic or divinity or anything that surpassed the physical in the way I see the world. You probably will come around at some point and realise how little explanative power you had in the old theories, and that the new way of thinking is actually just as poetic as the old one. Nothing was lost, you don't need to defend the old ways. If you'd decide to learn more about AI, RL and game theory you will be able to philosophically appreciate the wonders of life even more than now. Thousands of years of spiritual tradition stand in contradiction to billions of years of evidence from evolution and the amazing progress of the last decades in understanding the way things work.