Why should we not consider the emergence of human scientific abstractions itself any less a part of physical reality unfolding? If anything, while I agree with you we are but animals in the grand scheme of things, the fact that we have significantly altered our material daily existence so significantly and so rapidly should further convince you that the mental abstractions we use to describe the world nowadays are unusually well-grounded in reality, compared to the past. In certain places, anyway.
So civilization's success means some people sometimes are right about their ideas of reality. Still weird to me that a lifeform in a random little planet in a random little galaxy claims to have the essence of universal reality figured out. Pointing to our scribbles and how logically concatenated they are just adds comic value in the picture I'm seeing.
It gets even funnier - it would appear that the universe is itself struggling at understanding itself; people just appear to be a byproduct of this process ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Still weird to me that a lifeform in a random little planet in a random little galaxy claims to have the essence of universal reality figured out.
Physicists are well aware that their knowledge is not complete. On the other hand, our theories seem to fit reality too well. Physicists are yearning for data that points at new phenomena that would force us to discard the old theories, like relativity and QM forced us in the past. Currently, there seems to be no further good avenue to breakthroughs than staring harder at our data and building bigger experiments and detectors, all the while hoping that the conditions revealing new physics are not magnitudes above what we can ever reproduce on Earth.
