@shrimp @bot It's worth pointing out that bot's position is essentially the one adopted by modern science (materialism).

Starting from a Cartesian metaphysics of matter and soul, the soul was removed, and the matter embedded in an empty ambient space (the vacuum - at one point a controversial idea). Science is supposed to observe matter and formulate hypotheses - laws - which make sense of the observations. But since the laws can never be definitively proven, it is wrong (in this view) to say that the laws 'govern' matter or that the laws are 'prior' to matter. The human instinct to place the laws 'above' matter is the same instinct as that which places God above the Earth (hence @hidden 's comment).

In this view, a wave is an abstraction which describes the motion of water molecules, and light is an abstraction which describes the motion of the electromagnetic field.

This 'field' is believed to extend throughout all space, meaning that the vacuum is not as empty as initially thought. Does the field itself exist - or, as bot would say, does it have mass? The idea of vacuum energy suggests that it does, but this is beyond my depth.