[fit2rule]

He's talking about the words we use - that they are just symbols, and are only representative of the observations made, and are not the actual thing being described, itself. We call it a 'brain', but it is so much more than that, and the more we look at it - the more we need to invent new symbols in order to describe what we're looking at. In fact, words are not the things they describe - words are just abstract symbols, and concepts which we attempt to communicate about. They aren't the actual thing.

So yes, bullshit. Fallacy. Lies. You get the point, entirely. We cannot use anything but a new word - which is, basically, a lie until everyone believes it (i.e. we all have the same abstract agreement about what the word means). No word is the thing it describes. So we really only have handles, or pointers, to reality .. and that is not the same.

[TheOtherHobbes]

But it still hurts when you kick a rock.

The article is trite hand waving. Of course we parse the world through symbols, but the symbols are shorthand for consistent, predictable experiences.

Does it matter if the physical experiences are created by physical objects in the Newtonian sense, or by quantum fields?

Not at all. Because if you drive a car into a wall fast enough you're still going to die. And so is everyone else who drives the same kind of car into the same kind of wall at the same speed.

If it turned out that the knowledge that your experience of reality is symbolic gave you the power to shape quantum fields directly, that would be an interesting thing.

Most humans don't experience reality in that way. (Writers of New Age books try to say otherwise, but there's no evidence they're right.)

The casual arrow of symbolic perception goes in one direction, from outside to in. So unless you have some way to hack the symbols and the experience they create, this kind of "explanation" is irrelevant.

[fit2rule]

>If it turned out that the knowledge that your experience of reality is symbolic gave you the power to shape quantum fields directly, that would be an interesting thing.

Ah, but it does: it gives you the ability to create new words for new things, and thus extend your reach and control out into the universe. We couldn't get to the moon until we'd figured out the right words to get us there. Then, we used those words to get us there.

The moon is still there. We got there because we described the effort to do so sufficiently well enough that the actions manifested into the universe, and we altered it according to our will - which is the real force of reality in the universe, since we can use will to both experience the natural world, and alter it irrevocably from what it would have been, had we all just left it alone - or at least not describe what we were going to do, so well, that it then just happens ..