My case for an Idealistic Monism

[Angrboda]

I would agree that the reality in our heads is a purely mental construct, never touching on the real. However, if you're actually arguing idealism in the classical sense, then the cause of these mental constructs is itself also mental. It's true that we have difficulty imagining how physical processes give rise to mental constructs like the thing we are, but that doesn't justify a cannot, only the observation that at present we do not have an explanation. That puzzle has a corresponding paradox in the real world. Quantum mechanics does not flow from our classical conceptions, and is thoroughly counter-intuitive in its implications. This counter-intuitiveness has given rise to dozens of interpretations of what is ontic in quantum mechanics, and what is epistemological. If world is nothing more than mind stuff, and we ourselves are mind stuff, how come we don't have an intuitive grasp of the way this world stuff works? You might postulate that the mind stuff that makes up the "shared world" is a different mind stuff than the mind stuff of our consciousness, but then you've broken the world at a cleanly articulated joint and no longer have a monism. One might suggest a similar "cannot" in that you can't derive the strangeness of quantum mechanics out of an understanding of simple mind stuff. We don't yet have such an understanding of the ontological and epistemological nature of quantum stuff either. So you have an argument for monism, supported by the inexplicability of consciousness on one hand, and an argument for dualism based on the inexplicability of quantum reality. I'd call that a draw.