&gt;If it turned out that the knowledge that your experience of reality is symbolic gave you the power to shape quantum fields directly, that would be an interesting thing.<p>Ah, but it does: it gives you the ability to create new words for new things, and thus extend your reach and control out into the universe.  We couldn&#x27;t get to the moon until we&#x27;d figured out the right words to get us there.  Then, we used those words to get us there.<p>The moon is still there.  We got there because we described the effort to do so sufficiently well enough that the actions manifested into the universe, and we altered it according to our will - which is the real force of reality in the universe, since we can use will to both experience the natural world, and alter it irrevocably from what it would have been, had we all just left it alone - or at least not describe what we were going to do, so well, that it then just happens ..