The modern record for a matter-wave superposition stands at a nanoparticle composed of roughly 7,000 sodium atoms (about 8 nanometers wide), achieving a massive "Schrödinger's cat" state at the scale of a small virus.
So then particles don't exist, and viruses also don't exist? Is "reality" just a dynamic pattern that doesn't exist in the naive sense? As astute stoics we should not worry ourselves with such matters, "shut up and calculate"?
There is something about quantum theory that is different in character from any physical theory posed before. To put a finger on it, the issue is this: The basic statement of the theory—the one we have all learned from our textbooks—seems to rely on terms our intuitions balk at as having any place in a fundamental description of reality. The notions of “observer” and “measurement” are taken as primitive, the very starting point of the theory. This is an unsettling situation! Shouldn’t physics be talking about what is before it starts talking about what will be seen and who will see it? Perhaps no one has put the point more forcefully than John Stewart Bell:
> What exactly qualifies some physical systems to play the role of ‘measurer’? Was the wavefunction of the world waiting to jump for thousands of millions of years until a single-celled living creature appeared? Or did it have to wait a little longer, for some better qualified system . . . with a PhD?
"reality" is just a picture painted on consciousness. A particle exists because consciousness, for some reason, perceive a particle. Physicists should stop looking for smaller particles, and look into space and time as something that emerge out of consciousness...
You are enthralled! "There is something there still!" you say to yourself.
But there is nothing there! The game engine just figured that the particle would collide with the triangle, and altered its velocity accordingly. But you are too caught up in your assumption that you do more experiments (I think this is what our physicists are doing in our world). But what ever you do, you can only observe the behavior implemented by the game engine, and not the game engine itself, or the computer that is running it....
But you can imagine it. You can imagine an explicitly implemented program and a computer with limited memory that is running it. And if you are allowed to consider it, they can do other experiments. Instead of looking into smaller and smaller things, you can look for other observations that might confirm this. Maybe you can go really far and see if they are not allowed to go beyond some threshold (Ref: The movie "The thirteenth floor").
And would that be pursuing something metaphysical?
Yes, physics is about learning about the rules that the game engine implements. It’s not about learning about some reality outside our own, that’s the domain of metaphysics. Physics can’t answer questions about what is happening outside our own reality, and indeed neither can anything else inside reality because (as you pointed out) we can only test and observe what the game engine allows.