Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[Sal]

I'm starting to think we're bogged down on purely semantic differences, when we're actually talking about the same phenomenon.

My argument, in a materialist worldview, is that everything - even ideas - is reducible to the material. That's the essence, as I understand it, of the materialist worldview.

To an idealist, we live in a stop-gap, wall or whathaveyou where ideas, qualia, or whatchamacallit is what everything is reducible to - even the material - an idealist, abstract representation of the material. Because we can't separate an observer (mind) from what it observes (reality).

If you compare the 2 paragraphs above - "ideas", "qualia" is just placeholder words that are equal to "material", "reality".

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The only thing I can see & concede, is that we can't separate mind from the material. For there even to be ideas of "mind" and "material" there needs to be a mind to observe the material, just as there needs material to be around to even make up a mind (the mind is afterall I think we can obviously agree on part-and-parcel of constituent reality).

So, is it purely semantics we disagree on? Or is there something special about ideas that I'm missing?