Some thoughts on the topic;

We, fauna, are mobile organisms, while flora are not. Given that we are intentionally conscious, but plants are not, then the first consideration would be to isolate what aspects of this difference explain the phenomena.

Plants are inherently networked, because they exist as part of the network, so any field effect is already integral to them.

Fauna, on the other hand, being mobile, are able to move about their environment, which requires them to be both physically distinct and able to distinguish, model and decide their course of action. Nodes able to move in their network.

For one thing, this would explain the sequential process of perception that organizes our understanding of reality. From which, as humanity, we evolved civilization out of narrative based cultures.

So our theory of time is of the point of the present, moving past to future. Physics codifies it as measures of duration.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events come and go.

There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the prsent, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is "conserved," because it is only present. It creates time. As well as temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

So the energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.

Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall.

Products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Consciousness goes past to future, while perceptions, emotions and thoughts go future to past.

Though it is our digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system perceives, sorts, orders and judges the forms precipitating out.

So the problem with math is that it is pattern recognition, not process derived. Description, rather than explanation.

If the body is distilled down to its most distinct and stable structure, that is the skeleton, not the seed. Map, not territory.

Math is emergent, not platonic. In the void, there is no form. Operations are verbs. Shapes emerge from the processes generating them, even if the same process always generates the same pattern.

Energy and consciousness have the same problem, when it comes to understanding them, since it is only the forms they generate that express their existence.

Galaxies are energy radiating out, as form coalesces in. If it's information all the way down, then is it energy all the way up?

Consider the problem of "dark matter;" What if the process of inward curvature starts all the way out where the most elemental "forms" become distinct, with quanta and photons?

Then it isn't gravity bending the light, but the bending of the light inward, into form, that is the initial start of the gravitational effect. Matter simply being the lower end of the spectrum.

How might consciousness manifest in ways which are just beyond the edge of measurement? All those myriad impulses and senses, that skitter off into the peripheral vision, when we try focusing direct attention on them. The energy that constantly moves onto the next wave, as the old recedes.

Epicycles were brilliant math, as description, but the crysalline spheres were lousy physics, as explantion.

Might we still be in the same dead end?

Consider the relationship between our civil and cultural forms, versus the social energies driving them. Maybe a lot of our various problems might be accessible through a common dynamic.

Cosmic convection cycles.