Sorry for my late reply .. (I missed your response there).But who said its a desperate grab. It seems to me what you were saying and what the evidence seems to point to is consciousness and Mind being fundamental. As you said "'The thing itself' never gets tested in science. Science deals in models". Those models are of the Mind and the 'thing itself' like 'matter' can never be verified in itself as real because its a model about something outside our mind. This makes consciousness and Mind fundamental before all else.
Its not only science that demonstrably deals in models.
Non-scientific thinkers also deal in models .. (which is a claim that can be demonstrated by applying the scientific method).
To understand the perspective I'm mostly on about here, one has to abandon the untestable belief that there really is 'an outside of' and 'an inside of' the mind, which is easy to do, once one observes how the mind constantly applies meaning to the (english language) phrase 'really is', as the only means of coming up with the model of: 'what exists inside and outside the mind' and then just goes on believing that (with never any commitment to actually testing that notion) .. IOW: that way is just semantics.
Science's way however, using your example of matter; matter can be assigned to exist in science's objective reality by applying the scientific method and looking at the remarkable consistency of results with the predictions of the hypothesis that: measurements will return remarkably consistent results and looking at those results. The first step in doing that, is to develop a testable definition 'of what matter is' (which is well covered in science's definitions).
Can you see the two vastly different methods at play there in deciding what is real and what isn't?
I would say that all you've observably done there, is to come up with a meaning of 'the world' by way of the process you call 'direct experience'. Both are still demonstrably models formed by your mind .. with no evidence whatsoever for something truly existing independently from any human mind whatsoever.But I do disagree that our subjective model of reality is a mind model. I think its just what it is, our direct experiencing of the world. From this we can derive realities about the world. For example our experience of color and pain which are not measured in the same way as objective material reality but nonetheless can be measured in terms of them being embodied into our lives.
See, the whole purpose of this admittedly difficult to grasp perspective, is to shift the responsibility back onto ourselves, (where responsibility always resides), when it comes to what we mean by 'is real' .. as opposed to trying to weasel out of that, by pushing it onto something no-one can demonstrate (and only believe or, have faith in, at best) .. which is that the world exists independently from whatever meaning we assign to the phrase: 'the outside world' ... which is really just a semantic cop-out, or a cover-up, created to sleaze our way out of that responsibility.
Anyone claiming that our own consciousness is not fundamental, has instantly self-defeated everything they have to say following such a dumb claim, IMO.You said "Our minds demonstrably update our knowledge with new meanings for the word 'reality' used there". I took this as support for the idea that consciousness/mind is fundamental in that it is Minds that have knowledge and information and it is the conscious observer who creates the meaning of reality and reality itself through knowledge. Without the conscious observer and knowledge there is no reality. Interpretations of QM seem to support this.
My reason there being, of course, is that we all can see from their word usage how they are invoking human meanings in contradicting their own position. Like: try using meanings to argue that point when you're unconscious! It cannot be done, therefore they're just blind (deliberately or otherwise), to observing their own dependence on their own consciousness to do that.
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