A Conscious Universe

[Alex K]

I think, bennyboy, your notion what is real stuff and what not, is more prejudice and a result of the evolution of our perception of the "macroscopic" world, than based on a clear criterion for what is real. There are only gradations of uncertainty in quantum physics, and hence in current physics. At which point one starts to call something real must necessarily be an arbitrary convention.

Also I agree with Pickup. I'd add that history has shown that the mathematical structures we use to successfully describe nature often turn out to not correspond exactly to the actual structure of natural phenomena. The examples are the usual ones - newtonian point masses work wonderfully, until you hit quantum theory and special relativity. Then it turns out that space isn't really flat because of general relativity. We may have to abandon point masses in favor of strings to accommodate this fact, or maybe something else we haven't thought of. And so on and so forth. Why should this now be different for quantum theory? Prima la fisica, poi le parole. The mathematics follows nature.

Even if we decide to believe that it is in principle possible to model nature exactly in a theory of everything using mathematics, we can never know empirically when we have truly reached this goal. The insight is therefore of limited value. Those who believe that mathematical structures are real in the sense that they correspond to structures in nature exactly in some way, may be right but have in my opinion no good evidence for this view.