A Conscious Universe

[Mudhammam]

The evidence is treated as objective support for a claim. However, we still have the same problem: the supposedly objective evidence is collected using purely subjective means: looking through microscopes, holding a stopwatch in your hand, etc.

Put it this way: what would be the difference between the Matrix running a simulated world in which all our physical commonalities are as we now experience them, and our "real" world? Unless you know where your experiences come from, we're looking at circular reasoning: I know where experiences come from, because I experience things, and based on those experiences, it seems most likely that they come from _____.

The mistake in your position, however, is to conflate subjective experiences with what is actually taken to be understood as objective. Any particular subjective experience can truly lead to a mistaken interpretation in how one perceives the context of the events in reality, and by objective we emphatically mean external objects that really exist independently of us and our sense intuitions, even if only known and understood through sense. This is why we separate purely subjective experience such as a lucid dream or hallucination from everyday experience in the world: it really is real, filled with many strange and unknown features that collaborative efforts illuminate all the time. Now, of course, reality as it is fundamentally may be completely different from the world we experience, but again, we know this by taking the world as a place where laws actually exist, and real things evolve from simpler constituents unlike anything we will ever encounter in experience. This is all taken as true upon both idealism and realism. Even space and time may not be fundamental, and it's always theoretically possible that we live in a holographic universe where events occur on the two-dimensional surface of an event horizon and what we perceive as "real" is merely a three-dimensional model. Either way, this does not imply idealism, which seems to me to be an unnecessary step.