A Conscious Universe

[bennyboy]

How does that justify the leap that the ideas themselves and not the things they attempt to define have some primary status as the fundamental constituents of matter or a deeper reality?

It's like the value of i, the square root of -1. It is a meaningful idea, but cannot be manifested. We can't count that amount of things, and cannot manifest it in 3D space. And yet, we couldn't really model the universe without it. I believe that under the hood, all the building blocks of reality are like i in this way.

It's the advantage of idealism: nothing experienced is ultimately invalidated-- things are only brought into and out of context. So the content of dreams is not "false." It's a real experience inside the context of the dream, but not in the context of mundane life. And our mundane view of looking at the universe as a collection of volume-filling objects like desks and computers is not false, either; it's valid in the context of mundane life, but not in the context of QM. And quirky particles that evade our attempts to model them aren't invalid except in the context of our mundane view.

What do you mean "nothing experienced is ultimately invalidated"? No one would dispute that people often confuse experience with objects in the mind only with objects that also exist outside of it, in the real world, so as to think the one phenomenon truly exists apart from their imagination. Simply to divide the two into "contexts" that are both mental, dismissing the physicality of objects as no more a qualifier for what exists objectively than the wisps of a dream, seems unhelpful, unjustified, and utterly confusing.

I don't like the word "real." All experiences are intrinsically real. The difference is that some of them are consistent and sharable, making them worth organized study, and some are not. Experiences of density, color, size, momentum, etc. are sharable and worth organized study. Dreams about being a pretty, pretty dragon princess on planet Xargon probably are not.