Georgina Woodward
Georgina,
You, like almost all of humanity, are trapped in a huge maze of our ancestors creation. A "reality" maze, with no entrance or exit. You, like everyone else, was born inside it. And it was built inside an even larger such maze, and that within another even larger...
You can either stumble around lost within it, for your entire life (like the physicsts have been doing for the past century), looking for a non-existent exit, or you can smash your way out. The choice is yours. You can either be like Alexander the Great and simply destroy this Gordian Maze, or you can remain forever, bound within it.
Shannon gifted us all with a weapon, powerful enough to smash the maze. Use it. Yes, it is an awful prospect to have to rebuild everything, from the shattered pieces. But there is no other way out. Like the "Quantum Reality" puzzle I posted above, individual pieces can not be moved into an alternative new configuration, one-at-a-time, that "fits inside the box". Evolutionary changes are not possible. Only a revolutionary, all encompassing change, will ever suffice, to free you from the maze and provide you with an opportunity to rebuild it correctly. That is just the Nature of Reality, like it or not. And very few indeed, like it.
I'm not persuaded to give up on material reality
You do not have to. You only have to give up on your unwarranted belief, that you have ever inherited a reasonable Picture of Reality. But like most people, that seems to you, to be an even worse alternative. Like most people, you fervently hope to save the Picture of Reality that you inherited, and have invested your whole life in trying to maintain - like an old British Lord, trying to keep his old, inherited, crumbling castle, from collapsing, rather than tearing it down and building a new one. You can save it. But only at the cost of being forever trapped within your old, worn down, woefully inadequate Picture of Reality. And never even catching a glimpse of Actual Reality. The choice Is yours. The irony in that, is that all the people like yourself, are running around with smart-phones etc, that would never work, except by exploiting Shannon's discovery. You all seem to believe that those communications signals, would appear like just a very fast sequence of ones and zeroes, maybe with a little bit of error correction thrown into the mix. They do not. Just as Shannon said they must, they would appear to you, as meaningless noise. In fact, in many cases, your concept of "measuring" them, would fail to even establish they they exist, all around you. Using your antiquated "Picture of Realty", you would never observe anything at all, other than noise. There is nothing there to ever even be "measured", via the hopelessly naive concept of "measurement" that you and physicists, are clinging to.