Abstract

This paper proposes a unified framework that integrates predictive processing, active inference, minimal phenomenal selfhood, and philosophical theories of counterpart relations to explain how mathematics emerges as a shared hallucination that serves as the foundation for collective understanding. We argue that all organisms, by virtue of being predictive systems, hallucinate their sensory world, and that mathematics arises as the invariant structure that remains consistent across all such hallucinations. This shared hallucination provides the stability underlying scientific understanding, physical intuition, and intersubjective cognition, offering a rigorous formalization of the philosophical insight that mathematics functions as both form and concept, particularly as illuminated by considerations of the minimal bodily self.