I don't think there's much point in continuing this thread since we obviously have very different ways of conceptualizing reality. I will say one more thing ho

I don't think there's much point in continuing this thread since we obviously have very different ways of conceptualizing reality. I will say one more thing however: I never said that abstractions cannot affect the physical world, I said that they cannot produce non-abstract things. A computation can affect the physical world by modulating the flow of electrons (which already existed, they were not created by the computation) to an output device, such as a screen that will display something you can see. But everything described in that last sentence isn't part of the abstract computation itself, it's a side-effect when the computation is run on a particular type of hardware. If instead you ran the same program using a human computer, as Alan Turing suggested in his well known paper on the halting problem, which largely created the field of computer science, then the result would not be displayed on a screen but instead perhaps written on a piece of paper. Nonetheless it's the same computation that was run in both cases. That's why computation is intrinsically abstract by nature.