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

[JuliaL]

Nature has no basic nature.  It is what it is.
Distinctions between abstract and material, particle or wave, are artificial but required by us.

Perhaps but WE are nature, so it's almost as if one could say, at least in some small pockets of nature, the physical and the abstract are required BY NATURE to make it, to some  degree at least, intelligible to itself.

That these concepts work so well in explaining a record of nature that extends to the "beginning" of time (or the asymmetric "edge") and throughout its possibly infinite spatial magnitude, applying in all places we have been able to verify, leads me to think that these features represent something that is basic and universal, whether it's truly neither or somehow a dualism of both. By "basic" I mean nature as it is versus how creatures (that use equipment developed primarily for survival and not for solving the puzzles that a "deeper understanding" of reality's texture seems to offer) intuitively perceive and conceive it.

Bolding added.

I'm not so convinced that a thin coating of wet slime on a mote in the Milky Way is the means by which nature knows itself. 
I see no requirement or framework in nature that requires or even hints that it has a goal to know itself and that we are it.

Shouldn't being impressed by the degree to which "these concepts work so well" require knowing how well they work in the rest of reality?  We just don't know what's outside of what we can see, be it on the other side of the singularity or beyond the quasars.  Maybe it is a multitude of universes, or a multitude of multiverses locked away from our examination and modeling, how much we don't know....we don't know.  Yes, it is amazing that mathematical models are as predictive as they are, and equally frustrating that they are only as predictive as they are. What we have experienced is that every time we've pushed the horizon of what is known farther out, we've found another horizon.

How would we, as creatures using equipment developed primarily for survival, gain access to this "deeper understanding" or "basic nature" or know it if we found it?  We can make the best use of this equipment, but ultimately, it's a filter we can't avoid. Nature is what nature is.  We can split nature into abstractions and material assemblages, but it is not obliged to follow our lead.  We have to follow it as best we can.

The difference is found in how substances move (which are then formulated into theory) and how ideas move (which are formulated into grammatical and logical structure). Think of the difference of pure perception as in a waking state unaccompanied by rational labels, and pure conception as in a dream state accompanied by them.

I am inclined to think that your second category (ideas) as a subcategory of the first, residing as it does in physical minds. We're on the verge of understanding the generation of consciousness and there is no indication yet of anything non-material. I know we're not there yet, but please have patience, science has only known about neurons for ~200 years and information processing for 50. Shouldn't be long now.