On naturalism and consciousness

[Neo-Scholastic]

The difference is that in an idealistic universe, mind is omnipresent (or, more accurately, all is mind), and all "things" reduce down only to concepts

Could you elaborate on this benny? When you say "all 'things' reduce only to concepts," it sounds to me like you're putting the wagon before the horse, concepts before pure experience, and in my judgment concepts tend to reduce into disjointed fragments of reality; in other words, experience is continuous while concepts are often cut out and separated and defined by their independence from all other concepts... while pure experience oftentimes isn't quite so cleanly divided. Am I reading too much into your statement... or reading it wrong altogether?

Funny, because assuming, you are both monists, my dualist position sits halfway between you both. Pick-up your critique of idealism is valid and also opens up an objection to physical monisim. Indeed, everything starts with experiece, yet what principle allows the physical monist to parcel up reality without invoking transcendent forms or categories that the intellect uses as the basis for recognizing units of being (the problem of universals), and grouping units into sets according to similarities to the forms and/or a priori relational categories?