Nice! It's an interesting journey. Would wish to contribute some things:
a) It seems to me that your physicalist/idealist distinction is focused on the public/private, but I don't see why see it that way. There's no issue with a public mental realm. This is usually the distinction made by the abstract, but this seems quite arbitrary to me. Why posit a third ontological substance as opposed to just not reducing the mental to the merely private? What we refer to the universals/abstract can be reconciled with the mental without any issue at all.
b) An issue with the pointing aspect is that in my dreams I can point to objects, and even within a seemingly public sphere. In my dreams there are characters and a reality external to my immanent subjectivity. This would not be non-subjective, even if in my dream I can point to things, things can even be atomic, have mass, be forms of energy, and so on within my draem. The physicalist cannot get beyond this without validating the content of dreams as physical or being unduly arbitrary(any category chosen to define the "physical" could apply to the dream world, and so there would need to be an ad hoc characterization of the "physical" so that it excludes the dream).
c) Would referencing thought in such a similar way as you did with consciousness be problematic? What does the intellect think about? Well, the intellect thinks of thoughts or mental objects, but then this would fall into the same circularity you are pointing with the consciousness, but that would not imply that we ought to discard the intellective and a solution in that order can solve the consciousness: consciousness would be self-aware through consciousness objects. This self-relationality need not be an issue, or as many proponents do, the self could in itself be relational(that's the the Trinitarian ontology). Per a Heideggerean account I would point to consciousness being aware of Meaning, and consciousness itself be a form of Meaning but the Meaningful requires to be perceived to be meaningful. So we have a self-perceived Mind that becomes aware of itself through the Meaning of it, even through forms of meaning(that is, after all, what the intellect does: perceives the meaning of things. The essence and the relations). This would lead to a wholeness of the meaningful through the harmonization of all possible meanings within a singular Mind that relates to itself also in these meanings, creating the modes of perception of the immanent, the transcendental and what Heidegger calls Dasein.
d) I think that one cannot get outside subjectivism. We are fundamentally subjects. All your reasoning and knowledge seem to just narratives, way to organize and structure your own mental content. This, of course, does not entail a mere reduction to the immanent subjectivity, but gives rise to the transcendental subjectivity. But the Absolute identity of our own subjectivity would logically entail a "closed system".
Take knowledge as an example. I cannot know "outside" my own self and outside my own faculty for this knowledge. Knowledge is the act of using my inherent faculties to derive a narrative that is validated by other faculties(usually logic) and it's internal to me. This entails that either the ontological substance is fundamentally unknowable(fundamentally an Other to our very core subjectivity) or knowable and so minimally analogical to our subjectivity.
A possible solution to this closed system of utter self-referential subjectivity, is through the analogical. Through the partial and analogical knowledge of the Other through a commonality in the subjective do we experience aspects of the subjective closed to our self-reference. This opens the closed self unto a reality only possible if shared by the Other and entails a larger ontology, but also focused on the subjectivity. Each subjectivity represents their own ontology, but it's not a closed ontology, a communal form of ontology.
Have you considered Husserl/Heidegger? They speak of some of this stuff and it seems that it may be a step forward in your analysis. Ultimately all analysis ends up with a projection of the transcendental through the meaningful, which is already immmersed in the theological. As such, I think all philosophy that is true to itself, deals in religious themes and ends up being coherent only within a theological frame(in a general sense). Themes like incompleteness, transcendence, subjectivity, meaning, perception, immanent, exile, appropriation, value, unfaithfulness, authenticity, essences, and so on, because it all is a form of the subjectivity of relating itself through itself and Beyond itself.
Some time ago, I was struggling with the same problem of trying to determine whether the physical world or world of ideas is fundamental. I'm particular, even energy in physics is a mathematical quantity that doesn't always have a location, and when you get very deep into something like M-theory, space-time itself is thought to be derived from some non-special matrix—nothing to point at. And then, there's subjective experience: if a physicist invents a brain scanner and a neurologist uses it to study the physicist's brain, which is more fundamental? The signals from the brain-scanner can't be interpreted without the physicist's ideas and the physicist's brain is interpreted by the brain-scanner.
I eventually came to the conclusion that neither is more fundamental, as you have above. In fact, I think that physical reality and mathematical/logical reality are not just different aspects of reality, but the word "reality" is overloaded, the same letters and patterns of sound used to express two unrelated ideas—a homophone.
Then I went further—there's more than two. There are a number of different kinds of things that are all considered real, but I'm fundamentally different ways. Subjective experience can't be put in the same box as mathematical ideas—mathematical ideas are deductive and can be expressed as symbol manipulations that a machine can verify. Subjective experience/consciousness is different from that.
Nice! It's an interesting journey. Would wish to contribute some things:
a) It seems to me that your physicalist/idealist distinction is focused on the public/private, but I don't see why see it that way. There's no issue with a public mental realm. This is usually the distinction made by the abstract, but this seems quite arbitrary to me. Why posit a third ontological substance as opposed to just not reducing the mental to the merely private? What we refer to the universals/abstract can be reconciled with the mental without any issue at all.
b) An issue with the pointing aspect is that in my dreams I can point to objects, and even within a seemingly public sphere. In my dreams there are characters and a reality external to my immanent subjectivity. This would not be non-subjective, even if in my dream I can point to things, things can even be atomic, have mass, be forms of energy, and so on within my draem. The physicalist cannot get beyond this without validating the content of dreams as physical or being unduly arbitrary(any category chosen to define the "physical" could apply to the dream world, and so there would need to be an ad hoc characterization of the "physical" so that it excludes the dream).
c) Would referencing thought in such a similar way as you did with consciousness be problematic? What does the intellect think about? Well, the intellect thinks of thoughts or mental objects, but then this would fall into the same circularity you are pointing with the consciousness, but that would not imply that we ought to discard the intellective and a solution in that order can solve the consciousness: consciousness would be self-aware through consciousness objects. This self-relationality need not be an issue, or as many proponents do, the self could in itself be relational(that's the the Trinitarian ontology). Per a Heideggerean account I would point to consciousness being aware of Meaning, and consciousness itself be a form of Meaning but the Meaningful requires to be perceived to be meaningful. So we have a self-perceived Mind that becomes aware of itself through the Meaning of it, even through forms of meaning(that is, after all, what the intellect does: perceives the meaning of things. The essence and the relations). This would lead to a wholeness of the meaningful through the harmonization of all possible meanings within a singular Mind that relates to itself also in these meanings, creating the modes of perception of the immanent, the transcendental and what Heidegger calls Dasein.
d) I think that one cannot get outside subjectivism. We are fundamentally subjects. All your reasoning and knowledge seem to just narratives, way to organize and structure your own mental content. This, of course, does not entail a mere reduction to the immanent subjectivity, but gives rise to the transcendental subjectivity. But the Absolute identity of our own subjectivity would logically entail a "closed system".
Take knowledge as an example. I cannot know "outside" my own self and outside my own faculty for this knowledge. Knowledge is the act of using my inherent faculties to derive a narrative that is validated by other faculties(usually logic) and it's internal to me. This entails that either the ontological substance is fundamentally unknowable(fundamentally an Other to our very core subjectivity) or knowable and so minimally analogical to our subjectivity.
A possible solution to this closed system of utter self-referential subjectivity, is through the analogical. Through the partial and analogical knowledge of the Other through a commonality in the subjective do we experience aspects of the subjective closed to our self-reference. This opens the closed self unto a reality only possible if shared by the Other and entails a larger ontology, but also focused on the subjectivity. Each subjectivity represents their own ontology, but it's not a closed ontology, a communal form of ontology.
Have you considered Husserl/Heidegger? They speak of some of this stuff and it seems that it may be a step forward in your analysis. Ultimately all analysis ends up with a projection of the transcendental through the meaningful, which is already immmersed in the theological. As such, I think all philosophy that is true to itself, deals in religious themes and ends up being coherent only within a theological frame(in a general sense). Themes like incompleteness, transcendence, subjectivity, meaning, perception, immanent, exile, appropriation, value, unfaithfulness, authenticity, essences, and so on, because it all is a form of the subjectivity of relating itself through itself and Beyond itself.
So if the wind blows the leaves of the trees shake and so do the branches. The parallelism argument still seems to imply physicalism.
Nice!
Some time ago, I was struggling with the same problem of trying to determine whether the physical world or world of ideas is fundamental. I'm particular, even energy in physics is a mathematical quantity that doesn't always have a location, and when you get very deep into something like M-theory, space-time itself is thought to be derived from some non-special matrix—nothing to point at. And then, there's subjective experience: if a physicist invents a brain scanner and a neurologist uses it to study the physicist's brain, which is more fundamental? The signals from the brain-scanner can't be interpreted without the physicist's ideas and the physicist's brain is interpreted by the brain-scanner.
I eventually came to the conclusion that neither is more fundamental, as you have above. In fact, I think that physical reality and mathematical/logical reality are not just different aspects of reality, but the word "reality" is overloaded, the same letters and patterns of sound used to express two unrelated ideas—a homophone.
Then I went further—there's more than two. There are a number of different kinds of things that are all considered real, but I'm fundamentally different ways. Subjective experience can't be put in the same box as mathematical ideas—mathematical ideas are deductive and can be expressed as symbol manipulations that a machine can verify. Subjective experience/consciousness is different from that.
I attempted to write this up in https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i8C9KSryDFj4EENvx/reality-and-reality-boxes as a general statement of the idea. An earlier attempt, https://github.com/jpivarski/could-have-would-have-should-have, was written soon after it occurred to me that there was a third box beyond physical and mathematical—that causality is neither of these two.
I enjoyed reading your essay and wanted to share these because I think this anti-foundationalism is a way out of the fly-bottle.
Okay but why worry about the idea stuff and just focus on the physical stuff. It seems sufficiently explanatory.