Short essay on dualism, idealism, & materialism as concerns Q: What is a table?

[Mudhammam]

I don't think the point of a rebuttal to an objection is to instill conviction in you that the position which has been objected to is true...but that the objection to that proposition is not properly formed, and therefore uninformative.  

"While position x may not be accurate, the objection y does not demonstrate this as stated"

It's an interesting idea but does it mitigate any of the problems for materialism that the Cogito supposedly creates?  Is it uninformative to conceive "mind" as a distinct entity which is greater than the sum of its parts, rather than merely as a concept which signifies nothing in reality but the collective operation of those parts?  It seems like an identity problem still remains (recall the "ship of Theseus") and not one that that is purely theoretical or a matter of definition, as is the case with "nations", but that an actual (and perhaps fundamental) process remains unexplained and prone to the criticisms upon which all forms of body-mind dualism establish themselves.

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I suppose it's a bit of a conflation/equivocation, but I read "material" as "objective material," and to establish this view, I'd expect to find. . . objects.  It turns out that the most elemental particles of "material" don't actually have a form, nor can they be located precisely in either time or space.  I'd say something expressible only in terms of ideas (human ideas) is itself an idea (a universal idea)-- simply because they fail the most basic tests of objectivity.

Are you suggesting that "something expressible only in terms of ideas... fail the most basic tests of objectivity"?  If that's what you mean, that objectivity can refer exclusively to material objects, then I don't know if I agree.  On the one hand, if we talk about something that supposedly exists outside of our experience, then yes, it seems we need to have an object to which we can make reference, even if this object is only known indirectly through sensation.  Do the most elemental particles fail us in this regards?  I don't think so. On the other hand, if we are talking about ideals, or objects of reason, like value or beauty, then cannot we also appeal to the objectivity of logical functions, which necessitate universal ideas and are themselves necessary for intelligible experience? (As an aside, morality might then be but those laws that a hypothetical being who always acts rationally, or for the rational good, etc. determines and is compelled (by reason) to follow).

I'd say there is a philosophical or idealistic principle/s upon which everything else supervenes.  The word I prefer is "allows for."

Is this anything else but what is meant by "possibility"?  There are an infinite number of possible worlds.  In what sense do these "exist"? Is every single possibility an eternal "idea," some of which are "actualized" into spatio-temporal realities?  (This seems to have been what Plato thought, and later on Christians like Augustine and Leibniz).  It's an odd -- some might say self-contradictory -- thought that these possible worlds and objects actually exist simply on the merit that they can potentially exist.

So you are saying that it's as proper to say that objects define time and space as that there is a space and time which contains objects?  If so, it's an interesting perspective of chicken and egg, but I'm not sure which position I'd take.  Problem back to the ambiguity of superposition: both views are correct, and the "truth" doesn't resolve until you take a position.

Indeed, I am suggesting that as a possibility. Besides, as you say, all matter, time, and space, at least on some theories, is considered to have emerged at the beginning of our universe.  You're right that physics seems to want to take us back through the looking glass and into an ideal realm.

To say that which preceded all matter is matter doesn't seem logical to me.

Nothingness is always an option.   Maybe matter sits on a knife's edge somewhere between Being (form) and nothingness, the great war between Apollos and Dionysius, leaving all in a perpetual Heraclitean flux of "becoming," growth and decay...