I haven't heard of the Loader model, but as an (ex-) Particle Physicist, I should point out that photons are just one example of the more general phenomenon of gauge bosons. In terms of the particle content associated with nature (and the predictions the _existence_ of those particles imply as emergent phenomena from "gauge theories" in quantum field theory), the photons of electrodynamics as well as their counterparts, the weak bosons of the weak force and the gluons of quantum chromodynamics, all make very specific predictions about how certain particles ought to behave and the strength with which they should do so.

In that light, photons (and to a lesser extent, the other gauge bosons) play a significant role in theoretically calculating the dipole moment of the electron (how strong the electron interacts electromagnetically) which has been calculated to about 12 decimal places theoretically and experimentally measured to roughly the same precision. And the prediction fits _beautifully_, I believe it is the most (numerically) accurate prediction in all of science. So at the very least, photons are meaningful descriptions of some kind of quantum field oscillation whose existence is, implicitly, extraordinarily well determined.

Typing this in a rush, but just to say, photons are a very specific kind of energy quanta, and I don't think the loader model really replaces them in that sense.

I think photon self-interaction might be thought of as a confirmation of photon's existence. Particle ontology is a tough question, but I don't think there is a reason to exclude photon from the list without excluding all other particles.

Not to mention that experiments suggest that atoms don't play any special role in the underlying physical structure of reality.

Photons can also be seen as waves. And waves can also influence each other, in non-linear situations.

Because the experiments and theory are so simple, I think it is the most scientific approach, to at least test this Loader model more thoroughly. Even if I don't agree with it. ;-)

The simplest interpretation is that there is no such thing as matter. Physicists are studying consciousness.

It is actually the only explanation that is consistent with experience, since there is no experience outside of consciousness.

Perhaps there is no experience outside of consciousness (depending on exactly what you mean by that). I take it to mean that consciousness is the only thing that we (directly) experience. Fine. But that doesn't mean that "studying consciousness" is the only explanation that is consistent with "no experience outside of consciousness". It's the only explanation that's limited to that.

A real external world is perfectly consistent with us not experiencing anything outside of consciousness, that is, that our consciousness is how we experience what we experience. There's still something out there - an external world - that we experience, though.

The alternative way of taking your words - that there is no external world at all, that all we are is consciousness, that we aren't actually experiencing a real world - is the total death of science, because there's nothing actually there to study.

This is a new agey woo kind of idea that comes probably from a layman's interpretation of the effect of the observer on changing the quantum system being measured. However, it does not scale to macro systems. As Sam Harris put it when debating this idea with Deepak Chopra, the moon does not disappear when we're not looking at it. The universe was before consciousness and will continue to be afterwards.

To go even further, "particles" are also a construction of ours, a representation of an even more "diffuse" reality.

"Spacetime is doomed. There is no such thing as spacetime fundamentally in the actual underlying description of the laws of physics. That is very startling because what physics is supposed to be about is describing things as they happen in space and time. So if there's no spacetime, it's not clear what physics is about." - Nima Arkani-Hamed Cornell Messenger Lecture 2010.

> As Sam Harris put it when debating this idea with Deepak Chopra, the moon does not disappear when we're not looking at it.

That’s a silly statement. How do we know that, if we aren’t looking at it?

Because we have object permanence. People like Deepak Chopra select magical assumptions specifically because they can't produce any verifiable predictions, and waste everybody's time promoting meaningless nonsense.

I'm not sure Deepak Chopra is the best representative for such ideas. Donald Hoffman or Bernardo Kastrup make a much more serious case.

But still, the number one unverifiable prediction is that there is a thing called matter that exists outside consciousness and that somehow, consciousness emerges out of it. Nobody can prove matter exists, nobody has ever had a direct experience of it, and nobody has any idea how consciousness could come out of it, yet it's still the default hypothesis…

Object permanece is a silly statement? On the contrary it's the mainstream view. Anyone wanting to challenge it has the burden of proof on them to demonstrate otherwise.

I'm pretty sure the mainstream view is that the moon "as a glowing disc" is entirely created by your brain.

It does not mean that there is nothing when no one is looking, just that what we see is a representation by our brain of something objective that we can't directly assess. The representation stops to exist when we stop looking. What part is representation and what part is objective is debatable.

Assigning more to the representation and less to the objective solves some problems neatly, like that of quantum entanglement.

Take Donald Hoffman's example of a cube drawn in perspective as lines on a piece of paper. In your mind you see a cube, but nowhere is there actually a cube. The front and back faces of the cube are entangled : if your mind has decided on the projection in which one face is the "front", the other face has to be the "back", and vice-versa if your mind has decided on the other projection.

I wished people offered a rebuttal instead of just downvoting. I understand Einstein himself entertained the idea.