Proof Mind is Fundamental and Matter Doesn't Exist

[bennyboy]

The difference is that I have direct access to the experience of ideas, and therefore choose idealism as the most sensible default position.  You do not have direct access to the material monism about which you have ideas, unless you pretend that the subjective experience of mind and the objective "reality" of the objects contemplated by mind are identical.

Your direct access might inform you about yourself, but how could it inform you about the universe?   The comments you've made don't lead to or imply idealism as a stance on the fundamental nature of our universe.  If they were more thoroughly argued, more adequately explained, and absolutely true....they only have the power to generate conclusions regarding yourself.

They only have the power to generate inferences regarding my experiences. . . which may or may not be of the self, and which may or may not be representative of any fundamental truth.

Yet your experience of what we have labeled "material" is not compelling enough?  That things really do seem to behave in the manner described isn't compelling enough?

No, it's not.  Accepting that something exists, and asserting that it exists as you think it exists, are an order of magnitude apart.  I know particles exist, because I've learned about them in books; they exist at least as ideas that can be read about in books, and I suspect that if I went to a lab, I could find ways to infer that they existed in other ways.  However, I do not know that underlying those particles is a reality which is material at its foundation.  I do not know that they are not Matrix particles, or Mind of God particles, or BIJ particles, or expressions of immaterial mathematical principles.

Are you fine with being an agnostic idealist whose reached that position..and who advocates -for- that position, with a composition fallacy?  Doesn't the position deserve better support?  Surely there's some other way......some other reason you find idealism compelling?  If it turned out that you were made of cheese....you'd think the universe was made of cheese

No, because for me to be able consider this fact, I'd at least be cheese with a mind.  And the mind would probably wonder in what way, exactly, the cheese could be known for sure to exist as it seemed to-- and conclude that it couldn't.