Seeing red

[The Grand Nudger]

An object is really relative to a subjective agent-- one observes something.  So from my perspective, I am not an object.  My body is.  My ideas are, perhaps.  I'm not.  I'm the "who" who is looking at and experiencing things.  When you say I'm an object, you are conflating the human body with the human experience, and those things are clearly not equal quantities.

Ah, but I can demonstrate the object of you....and I do not know, perhaps could not know, whether or not there even -is- a mind behind it....or so I've been told.

As for idealism: it's not really an explanation for anything.  It's more simply a sensible set arrangement.  A material world view really has no sensible explanation for the mind.  However, an idealistic world view can include and subsume all of the material world view, because the material world view is experienced by us purely as ideas anyway.

It pains me to see you reassert this so often and so erroneously.  You do not think that materialism explains your mind, but this does not mean it cannot or has not offered a sensible explanation of mind.  You may steal the concepts of your opposition at your own peril, as I've often reminded you.  Ultimately, because of this, wherever I am wrong you will be as well.

When you look in that microscope, are you actually experiencing a bacterium?  No, you're experiencing the sensation of light, presumably as processed by the coordinated efforts of several brain structures.  But your experience of the microscope is an idea.  So is the experience of your science professor, of reading a book about science, etc.  It's all, from the perspective of a subjective agent, just ideas anyway.  So idealism requires no extension, but rather the retraction of an unprovable philosophical assumption-- that everything is as it seems to be.  Whether we're in the Matrix, or the Mind of God, or a BIJ, or a real physical universe is irrelevant to us, so long as our experience of sensations and ideas has enough coherence for us to develop a world view and live our lives.

The idea of the thing is not the thing.  Simple logic, not a revelation. OFC things may not be as they seem..but if they are not neither you nor I have any legitimate means of inference. People often set fire to the ground when they realize the fight is unwinnable, but when the ground burns it burns beneath us both. Your call, I guess...you can deny your experience in service of what you say is not an explanation, if you like. I doubt it will lead you to knowledge.