Are Particles 'Physical Things' or 'Abstract Ideas'?

[Mudhammam]

That's a good point. I feel like an idiot for not having thought of that, tbh.

---

That kind of settles the question about fields, no?

Why?

If the interaction of abstract ideas can kill a person, it can kill a person.  If it can melt off your face, it can melt off your face.  None of these very real effects means that particles are things rather than abstract ideas.

At what point do abstract models crossover into effectual materializations? How does that happen? I view abstract frameworks and material substances as mutually necessary for intelligible interactions but I don't think they have a causal relationship with one another. Rather, I see them as correlative. Change in one is simultaneously change in the other. Now, the idea that QM only deals with abstract entities would mean that at some level we reach the end of (the) matter (pun intended) and are only dealing with the structural form that underlies material phenomenon, and not matter itself (i.e. the formal cause of various motions, not an "abstract cause" of the substances themselves), but if within this domain we observe changes that are experienced in the material world it seems to me only sensible to search for material causes, with the caveat that we can never truly free ourselves from the abstract nature of matter, or highly ordered motions, which make conceptual experience possible. The effects of QM I never doubted, and that nature is every bit as abstract as it is material I'm coming around to seriously embrace, but the question for me was whether or not theoretical physics is really dealing with matter at all, or if rather it instead was confusing form with matter... However, what is seen to have direct consequence on matter (and not merely in terms of a theoretical explanation for observed causes and effects of material objects) cannot simply be form as the latter is only dimly experienced through strictly conceptual means... And concepts aren't physical.

If that sounds garbled, it's admittedly difficult trying to think about this stuff clearly, much less explaining those thoughts.