Unless you happen to be religious, this would seem to be more of a problem of word usage than a question about reality. It's not entirely obvious how to classi

Unless you happen to be religious, this would seem to be more of a problem of word usage than a question about reality. It's not entirely obvious how to classify things that exist only as representations imposed on a different medium. Others have already pointed out that you have the same problem with software. You could construct quite a number of such confusing cases -- for example, is a spoken word a physical thing? What about a football game? How about the stock market? The issue here with these sorts of things is that meaning is attached to the state of some physical matter, but the meaning is not an inherent part of the matter itself -- at least as we'd usually classify it. I think probably the best thing to do with something like this is just to acknowledge it as a semantics issue and move on; I don't think you'll get much more insight into the subject of interest (thought, software, language, football, stocks, or whatever...) by worrying too much about its classification status as "physical" or not -- unless you're actually studying it for the point of studying the meta-issue of "problems relating to the attachment of meaning to physical things".