Do electrons exist?

[bennyboy]

Yeah, I can understand just using "material" or "physical" as interchangeable with "literally existent", as opposed to abstract, but you haven’t actually said anything by doing so. You certainly haven’t demonstrated that some things don’t/can’t exist, because they don’t fit whatever further definition of "material" you might like to use; that’s really just equivocating.

I’ve had pointless discussions like this before. I agree with someone that material means existent for the purposes of a discussion, then they try and say there’s some things that exist that aren’t material. That makes no sense either. That’s more equivocation.

I'd say that for a materialistic world view to make sense, you need a collection of things and their properties, expressible unambiguously in space and time. When you start talking about how fundamental particles are in an ambiguous state of superposition, and are able only to describe them mathematically, then I think clinging to our mundane mechanical sense is more likely to hinder science than to further it. You gotta go with the paradoxes and the craziness to really take reality head-on.

Let me say that you can call wave functions material if you want, and say that physics really IS a purely materialistic model. But the advantage to doing that isn't so much that science or a physical model requires it-- I think it's more that you don't want to open the door for woo: "Yeah man. . . the Universe is like. . . totally WATCHING us!"

I like the video I linked because it introduced a very interesting idea-- that the observer effect works supposedly "in retrospect" because we ourselves are entangled with the particles we are trying to experiment on. That's deep.