Here - I'll explain it to you (and what atoms and particles and molecules etc... are). They're human abstractions. Particles don't behave like particles because the programmer sat down and thought extremely hard how to create a universe with the best amount of variation and dynamics and complexity using the least amount of resources (i.e. compute power). Instead of modeling individual point particles and their trajectories at each time instance at each point in space - it programmed the universe instead in terms of particle trajectories and their dynamics (i.e. the universe only computes probabilities and probabilistic amplitudes for quantized events). Humans think of this behavior as being modelled as some sort of united 'field' but just like anything else this is also an abstraction. The dynamics and edges are there to make it possible to perform further information compression which plays a vital component in terms of the universe's evolution (i.e. the universe is an infinitely recursive function and the life forms within it are vital in enabling it to perform recursive compression state space transitions and to optimize its own information exchange dynamics).

as my old fried Witty used to say, the limits of my language are the limits of my world.

I’m convinced this is group hallucination. It must be so interesting to work at OpenAI, knowing you didn’t change a thing, and seeing that because of random chance, some small fraction of 100M users have all tricked each other that suddenly, something is different.