If you look at Frege’s original logical notation, all logical operators (apart from negation) reduce to conditional (‘if–then’) statements. Perhaps mathematics

If you look at Frege’s original logical notation, all logical operators (apart from negation) reduce to conditional (‘if–then’) statements. Perhaps mathematics mirrors the cause-and-effect structure of reality, similar to Hume’s idea of causation as empirical regularity. Numbers could then be understood as convenient fictional tools, while logical operators capture something genuinely real about how the world itself works. I'm no mathematician, but it's just a thought.