According to Strawson, it is matter that’s utterly mysterious, because we have no understanding of its intrinsic nature. And he has dubbed this “the hard problem of matter”: [Physics] tells us a great many facts about the mathematically describable structure of physical reality, facts that it expresses with numbers and equations . . . but it doesn’t tell us anything at all about the intrinsic nature of the stuff that fleshes out this structure. Physics is silent—perfectly and forever silent—on this question. . . . What is the fundamental stuff of physical reality, the stuff that is structured
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