Particles, fields and virtual reality simulation theories

An interesting new article in Aeon: "Is everything made of particles fields or both combined". In this discussion, it turns out that physicists Wheeler and Feynman in their hypothesis eliminate the real existence of electromagnetic fields. Particles simply respond to other particles in certain ways, no fields or other physical mechanisms required - this apparently was envisioned as simply the way the world works. 

It turns out this appears to supply an interesting link to the "world-is-a-virtual reality simulation" concepts.

In these simulation hypotheses the behavior of elementary particles and associated "fields" are ultimately immaterial calculations of the hyper data processor in a higher realm of existence. There are ultimately no such things as particles and fields, just calculation, ultimately just immaterial abstractions. And our space and time are ultimately abstract calculations. From our perspective, simply and unexplainably just the way the world works. Such cosmic computer-like simulation concepts have an uncanny ability to explain much of quantum mechanics.   

"Wheeler and Feynman – like Ritz – do away with the electromagnetic field and keep only the particles. As I mentioned earlier, Ritz’s field-free theory has particles interact across gaps in space and time so that each particle responds to the past states of the others. In the Wheeler-Feynman theory, particles respond to both the past and the future behaviour of one another. As in a time-travel movie, the future can influence the past. That’s a wild idea, but it seems to work. In appropriate circumstances, this revision yields accurate predictions about the motions of particles without any true self-interaction.
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Lazarovici argued that the electromagnetic field is merely a useful mathematical bookkeeping device that encodes this information about the past and future, not a real thing out there in the world.
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As things stand, the three-sided debate between Einstein, Ritz and Faraday remains unresolved. We’ve certainly made progress, but we don’t have a definitive answer. It is not yet clear what classical and quantum electrodynamics are telling us about reality. Is everything made of particles, fields or both?"

I wish there was a publicly accessible version of, if I'm remember[ing] the author correctly, Zeh's paper "There's no such thing as particles".

And if there are neither particles nor fields...

An interesting new article in Aeon: "Is everything made of particles fields or both combined". In this discussion, it turns out that physicists Wheeler and Feynman in their hypothesis eliminate the real existence of electromagnetic fields. Particles simply respond to other particles in certain ways, no fields or other physical mechanisms required - this apparently was envisioned as simply the way the world works. 

It turns out this appears to supply an interesting link to the "world-is-a-virtual reality simulation" concepts.

In these simulation hypotheses the behavior of elementary particles and associated "fields" are ultimately immaterial calculations of the hyper data processor in a higher realm of existence. There are ultimately no such things as particles and fields, just calculation, ultimately just immaterial abstractions. And our space and time are ultimately abstract calculations. From our perspective, simply and unexplainably just the way the world works. Such cosmic computer-like simulation concepts have an uncanny ability to explain much of quantum mechanics.   

I think the author Charles Sebens is "short-sheeting" J. A. Wheeler's actual stance.  Yes, Wheeler and his student Feynman made break-through analysis of particle interactions and therefore emphasized them over fields at one stage.  But, when it came to deep reality and the "meaty substance" behind fields and particles -- it was information!!!

 Wheeler divided his own life into three parts. The first part he called “Everything is Particles.” The second part was “Everything is Fields.” And the third part, which Wheeler considered the bedrock of his physical theory, he called “Everything is Information.”

 https://futurism.com/john-wheelers-participatory-universe#

I particularly like this quote from the article..

  Former student Richard Feynman, to Kip Thorne, declared, “Some people think that Wheeler’s gotten crazy in his later years, but he’s always been crazy!”

crazy like a fox, in my humble view

Just as a personal comment, I don't think everything is information.  Multiple levels of generative activity occur.  There appear to be more than just measurable physical and informational tracks, so that dualism is not a consideration.  The aesthetic, ethical or spiritual tracks occupy a large part of conscious behavior.  I have no comment about their ontology, other than saying they are influential in the quality of life and real-world behavioral output.

Information science has become a co-equal track to physical science.  Both explore and create process models for separate and distinct fields of activity, each with firm rules and outcomes.  When the universe began - there was a track of physical manifestations and a parallel, but separately evolving, track of informational probabilities.  Each one needed to explain what has happened, what we can know about the ever-present now, and what may happen in the future.

Information science and Bayesian reasoning can address the probabilistic answers found in the past and future.  Only empirical methods can export for a deep natural understanding of what is happening in the physicality of the present.

Maybe the physical present can be viewed philosophically as a special case of an "informational/digital reality".  But, I think that there is a gain in perspective in separating out the manifest (P=1) facts.  And give them special unique status from the influence of things that could of happened or may happen, while still respecting that the probabilistic influence is equally real in understanding outcomes.

Do we need the Concept of Particle? Early wave-mechanical account of radioactivity and tracks in a Wilson cloud chamber

At the end of the 1920’s, purely wave-mechanical accounts of atomic and subatomic processes were quite numerous, due to the relative familiarity of physicists with Schrödinger’s wave equation. The interpretative weakness of these accounts, as denounced by Heisenberg, was that they were seemingly difficult to reconcile with the discontinuity of microscopic phenomena, and especially with the concept of particle.

This difficulty is an early statement of the famous measurement problem of quantum mechanics. But Nevill Mott demonstrated that one can perfectly bypass the measurement problem, and yet offer a coherent account of quantum processes.

The most elaborated statement of his strategy of avoidance was presented in his theory of a-ray tracks in a cloud chamber, published in 1929. The performative solution (or dissolution) of the measurement problem presented in this paper of Nevill Mott is found to be remarkably convincing, and able to inspire ar enewal of the debate about the interpretation of quantum mechanics almost one century after its publication