I'm a bit cautious about math as a field. My sense is that it's become one of those very useful tools that has become a god.

Yes, nature is infinitely complex. As Stephen Wolfram put it, it would take a computer the size of the universe, to calculate the universe.

In which there are many deep patterns and pattern generating processes. One aspect of complexity, quite evident in biology, is that complexity compounds on itself, until it becomes unstable and collapses back to a more stable state, then starts over.

So the question I would ask, is there some underlaying mathematical nature, a platonic math, so to speak, or is it emergent, with the processes and patterns it describes?

If we boil a body down to its most stable structure, we have the skeleton, not the egg.

In the void, would there be some overarching deterministic pattern implicit in it, or do patterns emerge with the processes generating them?

If you start with flucuations, that would be where opposites, positive and negative emerge. Then quantization, etc.

Look out across the universe and you see lots of spheres, circles, spirals, but no squares, rectangles, etc, because in terms of the processes generating them, the circle is far more fundamentally basic, than the square.

Then there is the feedback between different patterns, energies, processes, building up exponential complexity.

Such that it is safe to say that even our most complex mathematical formulas barely scratch the surface of the reality we have to deal with. It is very easy to fall into what Carroll quite appropriately analogized as rabbit holes, of mathematical complexity.

Which is not to say they are not often quite brilliant. Our complex world of today would be impossible, without all these efforts.

But then our complex world is also breaking down, because a lot of fudges has been included in the mix. Consequently my caution and personal efforts to reconsider the basics first.

Here is an interesting interview, from a couple decades ago;

http://worrydream.com/refs/Mead%20-%20American%20Spectator%20Interview.html