Existential Import

[Mudhammam]

Idealism ftw.  All those things you are talking about are demonstrably real only as ideas.  Put your ball under the microscope, and poof! it disappears.  It was only ever really "a thing" in your mind to begin with.  That this non-thing is highly coherent and behaves consistently through time and space means that all those QM particles are just down with the program of supporting the ideas of things.

Morality and mythology clearly can exist only as ideas.  But there's something important to consider: your view of the people around you is ALSO a mythology.  Mom is "actually" a collection of wave functions vibrating in space.  There's no objective "beauty" for her to have, or kindness, or love, or her sense of what is right: NONE of the qualities by which you define a person actually exist.  Even the curves of her face are ideas: the brain organizing the general distribution of light into descriptive shapes, when in fact there is nothing there but a gazillion individual photons travelling in a straight line from an emitter to your eye.  You experience not the existent entity, but a mythological interface between your ego and the idea of "Mom-ness," which you believe you perceive but in fact have created as a kind of "best fit" for the collection of random perceptual memories you've stored and tried to relate to each other in as simple a way as possible.

So in my opinion, you don't have to justify anything.  Your so-called perceptive existence is just that part of your conceptual existence which is dependent on input coming (unless solipsism) from outside the self.  But by the time you get around to perceiving it, it's not qualitatively different than a vivid dream, which of course comes fom the self anyway.

I've been giving idealism a serious reconsideration as of late, not so much as it is related to mind per se, but as it relates to the concept of abstraction (concept of a concept?). When I say, "serious reconsideration," I don't mean that I'm putting all or even most of my time into further research of it, just that discussing Plato and numbers with my college professor has shaken my "dogmatic slumber" a little in the way that Kant did, and that I feel like the doorway between idealistic philosophies and my definition of credulity have been opened further. Now, I don't know what it means to exist independently in the abstract, or as you put it, "demonstrably real only as ideas," so that's about where I'm at with it, lol. 

I agree with most of what you said, but with qualification.

Put your ball under the microscope, and poof! it disappears.

Yes and no, I think. For example, when the popular physicist Sean M. Carroll says that all of matter is not made of discrete points, but that we should conceive of a thing's individual particles as excitations of different fields (for example, an electron field), like waves in an ocean, it seems undeniable that he is in one sense saying (my words), "reality as you perceive it is not as it actually is, but rather it is more like this mathematical concept," which is unreal according to the terms in which we usually speak of perceptive existence, but like the philosopher in Plato's cave discovers, what we perceive is only one representation of the matter. Yet, beyond the limitations of syntax, I believe he still means that these fields exist in a physical spacetime, and are every bit as independently real in a manner that the thoughts about them are not. But more thoughts about thoughts in a minute. 

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Take five steps away from your computer, but not too far that you can't see the continuous line above this sentence. But wait, it's not a continuous line. It's a collection of fifty or so units appositioned on the screen, and we all know that units aren't lines. But further away, there are no disconnected parallel units, there's just one straight line. I think in the same way, the ball doesn't disappear because we focus on one part of it and the part turns out to appear much different than it does when our vision is "further away." Zoom out far enough, and the ball is still there too. Maybe that's a crummy analogy, but that's the way I think of individual particles (or excitations in a field) and the apparent objects perceived by our relatively poor eyesight. I mean, if it was ever only a thing in my mind to begin with, then it makes no difference what it appears like very close or far away (far in the sense of human intuition).

That this non-thing is highly coherent and behaves consistently through time and space means that all those QM particles are just down with the program of supporting the ideas of things.

(Bold mine) So that's what is going on! 

Morality and mythology clearly can exist only as ideas.  But there's something important to consider: your view of the people around you is ALSO a mythology.  Mom is "actually" a collection of wave functions vibrating in space.  There's no objective "beauty" for her to have, or kindness, or love, or her sense of what is right: NONE of the qualities by which you define a person actually exist.  Even the curves of her face are ideas: the brain organizing the general distribution of light into descriptive shapes, when in fact there is nothing there but a gazillion individual photons travelling in a straight line from an emitter to your eye.  You experience not the existent entity, but a mythological interface between your ego and the idea of "Mom-ness," which you believe you perceive but in fact have created as a kind of "best fit" for the collection of random perceptual memories you've stored and tried to relate to each other in as simple a way as possible.

See, again I'm like yes, that seems true in one sense, but no in another. My view of the people around me is a mythology to an extent, but I think that has more to do with the psychological filters lying between our conscious thoughts (where something like beauty enters our mind) and total amount of information our brains receive at any given moment, rather than QM. Sure, in terms of physics, reality is still a lot different than human intuition leads on, but the reality we perceive is not mythological. "Mom" is a collection of wave functions vibrating in space, but like our disjointed units in the continuous line, they still have evolved according to formula and as a result operate, when seen from our vantage point (or that of presumably any other macroscopic organism), as concrete objects, and furthermore, according to a narrower set of rules. Granted, light is hitting our retina from every direction, and our brain reorganizes the data to put each thing in its proper spatial location, I don't think it can be said that it is our mind that determines the substance of all the individual objects we perceive, such as a thing's position in relation to us or anything else, though it's fair to ask how much of it is substance and how much of it is transposed by properties of mind and where precisely the distinction lies, as that's a much more open-ended question. You seem to know this already, though, because you say: 

Your so-called perceptive existence is just that part of your conceptual existence which is dependent on input coming (unless solipsism) from outside the self. 

So, perhaps I've misunderstood where you see mind come into play, or perhaps we just disagree on where the division lies. I see idealism as more of a solution to the problem that (a) perceptible objects seem finite by nature, as in everything composed of matter and within time (possibly a physical construct though I don't know what that really means either) appears doomed to a process of becoming and perishing, except abstract objects, and (b) certain abstract objects, while they exist in minds, behave, like everything else, according to abstract principles. So, for example, the force of gravity causes objects to move according to principles that we rewrite in mathematical language. But what are principles as such if not abstractions that have an independent existence? That is, unless we are going to say that the force of gravity only exists as it does, i.e. in a universal framework that appears rigid and consistent in application, in minds only, which does seem like solipsism. So, my inability to conceive of the differences between the modes of existence that I outlined in the OP makes me more open to idealism, but I'm not sure how far I see this as related to mind or QM specifically.