Time scale matters a lot in how we as humans perceive things like agency. Plants grow too slow for us to see any intent, but when you speed up a time lapse, suddenly it looks like plants reach for sunlight and vines for supports. Now, that may be projection on our part, but it may not be.

This only seems insane/crazy from the perspective of everyday life. But philosophically it checks out, "We live in a simulation" and all that.

The crux if it is that if you ever break from "the universe can be fully expressed mathematically", you are stuck in the mud of supernatural beliefs.

Once or twice I've experienced extreme pain, and it was downstream of a bright light shining on a wet rock for millions of years.

I try to imagine myself long ago, on the outside looking in, with someone explaining to me that extreme pain, wondrous art, hunger, triumph, and despair would all unfold in due time where the rocks were wet and the lights bright enough.

I can imagine myself calling this clear nonsense.

Isn't pain just a manifestation of a bunch of chemical and electrical signals in the brain and body? It's not "clearly nonsense" to me that you could cause pain by writing a sufficiently long sequence of 0's - for it to be obviously wrong, you'd have to have some understanding of where consciousness comes from.

If you don't understand that, how can you assert that it doesn't come from mathematical relationships?