The essay is in the form of a dialogue between the two authors. We take John Wheeler's idea of "It from Bit" as an essential clue and we rework the stucture of the bit not to the qubit, but to a logical particle that is its own anti-particle, a logical Marjorana particle. This is our key example of the amphibian nature of mathematics and the external world. We emphasize that mathematics is a combination of the conceptual and the calculational. At the conceptual level, mathematics is structured to be independent of time and multiplicity. Mathematics in this way occurs before number and counting, and can be described by the world of logic and boolean arithmetic. From this timeless domain, mathematics and mathematicians can explore worlds of multiplicity and infinity beyond the apparent limitations of the physical world and see that among these possible worlds there are matches with what is observed.
Louis Hirsch Kauffman