[fifticon]

It depends on which parts of math you feel are 'more real than others'. To someone who only just has learned math, the increasing counting numbers (1, 2, 3, 466..) are all 'real things'. But if you are very cynical about math, you might instead argue, that the only 'real' number we have, is the number '1'. All those others (2, 466..) are just "applications" of that '1'. That is to say, we adopt the shorthand '466', because we don't want to write down almost 500 1's each time we reference it. (think of it like very bad roman numerals..) In this perspective, where we ignore 'ordinary' numbers like 466, you might argue that prime numbers are more real, because they really 'do' something (that is, construct composite numbers, like the example with 1 above.)

You could have a thought experiment of a world, in which we never developed arabic numerals or roman numerals, but instead did all our math directly on prime numbers. It would be a weird world, but still, you might imagine it :-)