Status Updates From Lightness of Being: Mass, E...

Yeah

Realism is the general claim that there is a reality independent of our perspective, the nature of this independent reality is left indeterminate between material or any other number of things it could be made of

philosophical realists claim that matter is primary? This is a horrendous botch job of understanding basic philosophical positions. Realism is not the same as materialism, such a basic annoying error made by people who keep muddying the water and blocking better understanding of these issues.

Quantum fields in space do not resolve Einsteins problem about how to reconcile electromagnetic fields and photons,/waves and particles, for the simple reason that as you say in this book space is a result of general relativity yet quantum theory has yet to be reconciled with GR in quantum gravity, which you would need to coherently speak of quantum fields in space. this is an unsolved issue remaining.

To this day, the confusion of mechanical and luminiferous ether is a common point of error in simplified popularisations of relativity which talk only of ether as having been disproved and do not specify the subtlety involved in this conclusion, regarding the particular mechanical ether of Newton. But of course this also undermines atomism in the end, which is something most physicists still now refuse to see...

But of course once you go the field route, the idea of a full relational approach in the Machian sense has to be abandoned which was Einsteins original hope or goal, and so perhaps this was why he remained resistant for a while to the notion of the field, or luminiferous ether.

Important useful distinction made between the kind of ether Einsteins idea is consistent with that which it is inconsistent with. There is indeed still something akin to a luminiferous ether, but not a mechanical ether, as only the latter is done away with by Einsteins relativity.

The fact is it cannot, and if it is, one has to acknowledge the major Platonistic assumptions involved, this is where they will wax poetical and talk of symmetry and beauty, but none of this gets us beyond a hope that a particular way of representing things somehow must reflect the reality it represents. But to appeal to beauty is just to beg the question on this hope, not to give any reasonable argument for it.