You say you are concerned with the challenge of pulling our cultural head out of [what you perceive as] the sand of implausibility - well, in that case, I'm the

You say you are concerned with the challenge of pulling our cultural head out of [what you perceive as] the sand of implausibility - well, in that case, I'm the sort of person whose concerns you should be addressing: I don't think the hard problem (if there is one in the form it is conceived of by its proponents) is any harder for materialism than it is for any of the alternatives, but I am willing to give all due consideration to arguments that it is (and by "due consideration", I mean outside of internet discussion threads, even though my wife has banned me playing audio books and podcasts on the topic over the speakers when we are in a car together.) Unfortunately, your responses in this thread are not making the sort of arguments that are called for by your stated goal. Here, your response continues the theme of reasserting how obvious it seems to you that there is a hard problem which rules out materialism. This is not an argument, it is a belief. You are, of course, entitled to your beliefs, and I am sure you hold them strongly and sincerely, but the fact that you do does not establish that our cultural head is stuck in the sands of implausibility. Repetition does not make them more argument-like, nor does calling them "self-evident", nor insinuating that you see more clearly than others, nor wrapping them in language that might be appropriate for something that has an obvious proof. It is not enough, for an argument, to state propositions that other people who already agree with you will also agree with; that's just preaching to the choir. For the same reason, your complaint that no counter-arguments are being made falls short: counter-arguments are made to arguments, not unargued opinions. At this point, I suspect you may be thinking that a commitment to materialism is also a belief - and I would agree! The simple fact is that no -ism has delivered an explanation of consciousness, and when someone tries to tell me it is a fact that that consciousness is just a computation (or a non-computable physical process, Searle and Penrose), I point out that no-one has explained it in those terms. Nevertheless, there is a counter-argument here, and it is in my previous post, where I argue that the knowledge argument - which is widely regarded as the strongest argument for there being a hard problem that only affects materialism - is exactly as problematic, for any other putative explanation of consciousness, as it is for materialism (which does not rule out it being an illusory problem for any of them.) I may not have been completely clear about what it is and why it matters here, so I will make another attempt. The 'hard problem' is the claim that phenomenal consciousness and its associated qualia present an insurmountable challenge to materialism. Many people feel - sometimes strongly - that this is obviously so, but philosophers and scientists alike (and on both sides of the fence) rightly expect more justification for accepting this claim than these feelings of incredulity towards materialism. From your own account here, the hard problem is a necessary prerequisite for idealism: it is, as you said, a linchpin, and it is so in this sense: all the other claims you have made about idealism rest on there being a hard problem to take materialism out of consideration. Furthermore, for idealism to prevail over materialism, the hard problem must only exist for materialism (or, at least, not present a challenge to idealism), or else idealism would be saddled with exactly the same problem as materialism - a problem that you insist is insurmountable. So, putting the previous three paragraphs together, the proponents of idealism need a justification for there being a hard problem that applies only to materialism and not to idealism. In the years of reading papers and other scholarly articles on the issue, I have been struck by how often such justifications ultimately rest on some form of the knowledge argument (at least in this sense, Goff is entirely justified in calling it "the greatest argument against materialism.") To recap, this is the argument which boils down to "you can't learn what it is like to see colors from any physics book." Does this satisfy idealism's need for justification for the premise that there's a hard problem for materialism that does not apply to idealism itself? It does not, as we can simply substitute 'idealism book' for 'physics book', and the knowledge argument itself gives us no reason to think that the outcome will be any different. In fact, in your first response to this issue, you affirmed that knowing all of a completed idealist philosophy would do no better, in this regard, than knowing all of completed physics. Furthermore - and this is important - we can see that the knowledge argument is equally applicable to any field of what Torin Alter calls 'discursively learnable' knowledge without making any assumptions about the truth of materialism. Therefore, in the account of and justification for idealism in what you have written so far, there is at least one piece (the linchpin, no less) missing: an acceptable justification for thinking that there is a hard problem that does not present an equal problem for idealism. You entered this thread in a very assertive manner (your first sentence was " Perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of 'feelings'. But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths", and in your latest post, you adopted the mantle of someone who is pulling our collective heads from the sands of implausibility), but your responses have not, so far, lived up to this rhetoric.