It would be just as valid, and possibly more so, to invert the standard realist-idealist formulation and say: It is in the mind that experience is most real, while the hypothetical world beyond is imaginary.
It is in the conceptual domain where all the qualities usually associated with ‘realness’ reside: solidity, resistance, tactility, behavioural consistency, causal relations, verifiability, and the like. These are properties of our perceptual activity, our memory and learned experience, our capacity to make associations, to see construct patterns, to organise what our senses detect. It is we who give the world its realness.
Rather than asking how it is that the material world can give rise to the conscious mind, we should ask how the conscious mind gives rise to the material world.
