Srininasa Ramanujam was a mathematical intuitionist without parallel, who could seemingly pluck extremely complex mathematical formulae out of thin air. How he did it remains a mystery to mathematicians. According to Ramanujam, a goddess gifted these equations to him. He is known to have said "An equation for me has no meaning, unless it represents a thought of God.
I think that is simply the sort of causal explanation that the mind invents to explain a process that it cannot explain by other means. Somehow fully formed infinite series formulae presented themselves to Ramanujam. The formulae mostly turned out to be correct. There was no available explanation for this phenomenon to Ramanujam. To a believer's mind, the supernatural explanation would be the simplest.
How did fully formed complex mathematical equations present themselves to Ramanujam? That is a question people who study the brain may perhaps be able to answer. But the phenomenon of problems being solved by the 'unconscious mind' is fairly common. Most scientists would be familiar with this phenomenon: you think consciously about a problem for an amount of time without making much progress. Then at some later time, the solution simply presents itself to you. A lot of major scientific breakthroughs have happened when the scientist, after a period of continued conscious effort, was taking a break and not thinking about the problem at all.
For example, here is Freeman Dyson on his ground-breaking realization about quantum electrodynamics: "For two weeks I had not thought about physics, and now it came bursting into my consciousness like
an explosion. Feynman's pictures and Schwinger's equations began sorting themselves out in my head
with a clarity they had never had before."
Writers often say something similar as well. They speak about characters that come to their minds fully formed. A character with a mind and voice of his own, and all the author has to do is to follow the character.
This is something writers often do - they ascribe some amount objective reality to their creations. They speak about their characters as if they were people who did things independently of the writers, the writer only observes them at it. In other words, the writers did not invent them, they discovered them.
Some mathematicians say the same thing as well - mathematics is discovered, not invented. It has objective existence independent of humans. To anyone who knows about maths and the surprising connections between its seemingly disparate branches, such a feeling seems only natural. To my mind, the feeling stems once again from the fact that we don't really understand the way our brain invents things. Our 'unconscious' inventions - fictional or mathematical - can be coherent and consistent in a way that we do not fully grasp consciously. If a platonic world of mathematical entities does exist, perhaps it exists in those possible combinations and rules that our brain follows without our conscious participation.
