Fully agree, and I am mildly disappointed to see nobody has brought up Maturana and Varela in this entire thread.

The deeper layer is autopoiesis - the conceptual foundation authored by them that embodied/4E cognition builds on.

They defined cognition as a necessary property of self-referencing, self-maintaining boundaries in an information-theoretic/topological sense, not bound to any specific physical process.

This dissolves the dualism Rovelli targets in a way that pure materialist/eliminativist arguments don’t manage cleanly. Autopoiesis is fully physical (mathematically modelable, biologically grounded) but it locates consciousness in structural relationships and informational dynamics rather than a purely physical substrate.

Thompson’s Mind in Life (2007) is the contemporary version, and Varela’s later work integrates phenomenology directly.

I hold that it may be possible to use the toolkits of set/category/group/type theory to formalize these relationships.

Would be a vastly different conversation thread here if this work was more well known.