A Conscious Universe

[Mudhammam]

It's like the value of i, the square root of -1. It is a meaningful idea, but cannot be manifested. We can't count that amount of things, and cannot manifest it in 3D space. And yet, we couldn't really model the universe without it. I believe that under the hood, all the building blocks of reality are like i in this way.

You've touched upon language. That's it. We couldn't do much of anything without language. I don't really see how the name our species of ape gives a physical being or process can have any bearing on the nature of that being or its processes themselves. Of course, you are strictly speaking in terms of value (mathematical, ethical, social, etc.), which, though essential, is also not considered a physical object on my view, but is "real" as an expression of physical states and how our beings are personally disposed towards them---but that's an example of an object that really does not exist independent of us. You may argue that no object can be known in of itself because of the way our percepts and concepts depend on a brain that organizes the data before it enters the domain of consciousness, or you may say for some other reason that the deepest problems in reality are in principle not solvable to human minds or the CPUs we construct to do the hard work for us, and further, that the most we can truly know about the world boils down to certain ideas that contain only a nugget of nature's most elaborate secrets, but in any case, you cannot justify that everything, and not just the activities humans concern themselves with, are reducible to ideas lacking physical representation and still maintain that they have any existence outside of your head. That would be to confuse ontology and epistemology. Now that may be enough for you, but there is, on the other hand, what we call total fiction, in which case...

I don't like the word "real." All experiences are intrinsically real. The difference is that some of them are consistent and sharable, making them worth organized study, and some are not. Experiences of density, color, size, momentum, etc. are sharable and worth organized study. Dreams about being a pretty, pretty dragon princess on planet Xargon probably are not.

That's where I disagree with you and thinkers such as St. Augustine who also adopted the Platonic notion that there is no distinction between "the real and the apparently real." There is. You are a "real" human being in that you meet all the qualifications for being human (assuming you're not a robot), such as the philosophical or biological benchmarks we might decide upon, you exist in a space in time (even if you're composed of mind-bogglingly small bits of "stuff" that take on a more surreal existence), and anybody who wants to confirm that you're real can find ways to do so. Harry Potter is not a real human being (or wizard). Harry Potter is "really" a fictional character, but in the context we described you, he is not real. I don't think anyone really has trouble understanding the distinction. If you have to act as if there is some blurred line between what experiences we should consider imaginary and those that have a definite existence known (as much as anything could be) on the basis of our physical relation to it, I won't lie, that's not attracting me to your argument.