I'm wildly unqualified to present a meaningful opinion, but here goes :D

it's not circular. Physics is the root.

philosophy and math might have a claim that there's some extra-physical thing, but in my very very humble opinion, put up or shut up.

All the evidence we have is, math and philosophy can only be understood by electric meat. Electric rocks are making some progress. It's not at all clear if those are a side effect of electric meat, or if there's some other magic dust. But, uh, I ain't seen no magic dust. it might exist, and I might not be able to perceive it, cause I'm electric meat. :shrug:

Anyway, the point is, you can root a tree in physics. And, uh, there's no counter example that says rooting the tree in physics is wrong. Physics produces biology, biology produces math. We have clear examples of this (you can totally throw in more layers, like chemistry or whatever).

Math or philosophy may indeed be the root and all things flow from some deeper underlying organization. But we have very little evidence of that. I don't have the faith of a mustard seed, so I can't move mountains. I don't think anybody has been able to do that for a while, and I find the reports suspect. They may be true! But you'd sorta think that kinda thing would happen more often.

In any case, (as a computer scientist) I think you can pretty safely pick physics as the root. You could be wrong. But, like, you're going to be Newton wrong. Newton was absolutely dead wrong, arrow in the heart of the theory, when Einstein rolled in and upended everything. But it's close, and super helpful. I don't really consider time dilation when driving up a hill. (Maybe I should) Newton's model has been close enough so far.

In any case. I'm not really qualified. But I ain't seen no magic dust.

You can't meaningfully use physics to understand neuroscience, let alone language and culture.

As a neuroscientist: lots of my study is improved by the understanding of physics. Electrophysiology is a classical example of folks studying the physics-only aspect of neurobiology. But, more crucially than that, our brain cells are ion-specific. Some times they let in only sodium, some times only potassium, and some times only calcium. Understanding how biology maintains specificity at the single atom level, while letting in millions of those atoms in at the same time is a purely physical riddle. We have some answers to it, if I've sparked your curiosity. ;)

can you get to neuroscience, language or culture without physics?

I don't see the chain, but I might be overlooking something super obvious (or not so obvious)

Arithmetic isn't super helpful for calculus, but it's real tough (for me) to construct calculus without a notion of +.

So, I don't have any evidence of math, the very narrow branch of math in the sense of algebra, and proofs without electric meat. I'm open to a very broad definition. I think, we agree that two different things are equal, and if we change both sides the same way, they're still equal. that kind of gives us algebra.

Does anything else do that? Does anything else preserve equality that's not just simple physics?

Again, I'm wildly unqualified to make this argument, but maybe I learn something amazing.

How do you "close the knot"? I've got some computer science background and I can mostly deal with fix points. In what way would neuroscience be free from the underlying systems? I'm pretty sure I can represent computation with gears or electrons or marbles, or whatever, but those are rooted in physics. I'm super curious how you might represent neuroscience, language and culture without that foundation.

Whatever you say, Shelly-bean.