A Conscious Universe

[bennyboy]

First I think you're confusing epistemological idealism with metaphysical idealism. "Epistemological idealism is the view that reality can only be known through ideas, that only psychological experience can be apprehended by the mind."
"Metaphysical idealism is an ontological doctrine that holds that reality itself is incorporeal or experiential at its core. Beyond this, idealists disagree on which aspects of the mental are more basic. Platonic idealism affirms that abstractions are more basic to reality than the things we perceive, while subjective idealists and phenomenalists tend to privilege sensory experience over abstract reasoning."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism#Definitions

I'd say that epistemological idealism implies metaphysical idealism as the default position. The question given the philosophical fact (and I think it is a fact) of espistemological idealism, or at least of solipsism as the only truly gnostic position, then it is not knowable whether any limitations intrinsic to the human experience are veiling, or even distorting, our understanding of whatever reality underlies our experiences.

An epistemological idealists can be a physicalist since that's where her ideas take her.

As we've discuess, physics as a subject seen in this way is just studying reality, whatever it is, given the caveats that: 1) there's enough consistency to merit study, and 2) the one studying has the power to interact with that reality in order to verify its truth. But that physicalism is, at least to me, different than what most people mean when they view idealism and physicalism as diametrically opposite positions.

Physicalism is normally formulated as form of metaphysical realism (the view that external reality is independent of minds) but it doesn't need to be. The logical positivists were a type of physicalist and naturalist yet they were non-cognitivists about metaphysics. There has been a history of philosophers who would fit under a physicalist and naturalist umbrella but who if not anti-realist were hostile or indifferent to metaphysical realism in some ways. There are non-physicalists, anti-physicalists, non-naturalists, and supernaturalists who are all metaphysical realists and object to solipsistic idealism.
I just want to point that out. I'm OCD about this topic at times.

We can renegotiate semantics at any time, and I think we are in fact doing that right now. However, given the OP, this view of physicalism isn't really at odds with the flavor of idealism that I gravitate to, since it can comfortably reduce all of existence down to ideas without invalidating itself. Maybe that's what you're trying to say, after all?

My point in this thread is that I believe important aspects of reality cannot be expressed in terms of the interaction of real objects in a geometric 3D space framework: either because they are things with no volume or no mass, or because they are things which cannot reasonably be inferred from the observation of any physical system without begging the question: specifically, the nature of photons and the nature of mind. Given this, it seems that there are things which are not actually objects, and that these things are coherent ONLY as ideas.