I'm just an physics enthusiast and my knowledge is solely based on popular literature, but it seems to me that either (1) the mechanistic, computational, discre

I'm just an physics enthusiast and my knowledge is solely based on popular literature, but it seems to me that either (1) the mechanistic, computational, discrete view is the foundation and everything that appears continuous and field-like comes just from averaging over myriads of particle interactions, or (2) real-valued fields are the foundation and discrete structures appear at certain thresholds. In some sense the former possibility appears to be safer, because in the latter case we could just find ourselves in some meta-stable configuration, where some parameter of our universe could be sweeping through the parameter space in an unfortunate way, such that the threshold for matter to exist might get out of reach and everything could easily dissolve into a different structure.