Very interesting and useful. It has implications for the ontology known as "wave function realism" as well. That talks about the universe as being a 10^100 or so dimensional configuration space. That's off-putting enough in itself, and this makes it even worse..

Of course you always have to be careful with AI - it makes stuff up so needs confirmation. I asked one once about that and it said its defined task is to generate plausible responses. I said "Doesn't that make you a BS artist" and it said that they are similar but being an inanimate machine it does not have the capacity to have an intent to deceive, so it is not a BS artist. I consider that a BS answer that confirms my view, but didn't press it. Certainly making a distinction like that, however poorly, makes it somewhat like a philosopher.

Of course you always have to be careful with AI - it makes stuff up so needs confirmation — Gary Venter

I have adequate knowledge of two areas of thought and/or practice: mathematics and rock climbing. Yesterday I asked ChatGPT about a close friend of mine in the latter, what he is best known for. AI produced a reply that was entirely wrong, stating my friend was famous for a certain climb, while in fact he never did that climb and is known for an entirely different accomplishment. Made up facts.

Crazy. It does that a lot - some notorious stories out there. I was wondering if it did that about Fock spaces. I haven't gone into the math but from what I can tell a Fock space is a kind of Hilbert space that makes some important calculations a lot easier to do. See for instance https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/3819998/proof-that-fock-space-is-a-hilbert-space . So it is still true that the quantum field is a Hilbert space.

I'm more interested in arguments that the quantum field is itself physically real. It turns out that Faraday had a similar issue with trying to make the case that electric and magnetic fields were real. Kant was an opponent of this. He favored "the unmediated action at a distance of gravitation that would yield an epistemic ideal to which the alternative model of continuous action, with its hypothetical constructs, could not aspire. Easier far to treat such constructs as no more than mathematical devices, aids to the imagination, not to be taken in any way seriously in ontological terms." This is pretty much now how classically oriented physics talk about the quantum field.