Non-physicist perspective, if I’m out of line, please say so. It seems silly to expect that the wavefunctuon is “real” just like it is silly to assume that the

Non-physicist perspective, if I’m out of line, please say so. It seems silly to expect that the wavefunctuon is “real” just like it is silly to assume that the gravitational field is “real” or inches are “real”. They are mathematical constructions we use to make predictions about what we see. Just because the predictions are good doesn’t make the mathematical formalism real. As a contrived example, imagine an advanced AI program running on Linux. The AI develops all sorts of models and makes very accurate predictions about what will happen in user space when it calls fopen or pipes data from /dev/urandom. But no matter how well it models the output of /dev/urandom, it will never know that the reason why the data seems random is because the kernel is generating it from a camera pointed at a lava lamp. Even if the AI was smart enough to invent models for the lava lamp and the camera optics, etc, this model wouldn’t be real, it’s still some bits in memory /describing/ what is going on outside of the AIs immediate experience.