More Foundational Than Consciousness

Mind is more immediately known than one's experiences with matter, and this can be realized within several moments.  Sensory perceptions cannot exist without consciousness, but it is logically possible for consciousness to exist in the absence of subjective sensory perceptions and the metaphysical existence of matter.  Consciousness cannot be denied without the presence of conscious thought, so the denial of the immediate awareness one has of consciousness is riddled with epistemological errors and contradictions.

Consciousness is required to perceive matter to begin with, and thus is automatically more foundational than matter in an epistemological sense.  The fact that consciousness is more foundational than matter, at least in the aforementioned manner (there is no way to verify or falsify the strand of idealism holding that matter literally does not exist when it is not being consciously perceived), is nonetheless often misinterpreted.  Non-materialists are prone to regard mind as the most fundamental thing in existence.  This false mind-centric philosophy largely has the same ramifications whether or not the human mind or the mind of God are viewed as ultimate.

Now, it is not the idea that consciousness is more central than matter in terms of epistemology that is erroneous, but some of the tangential claims or implied stances of many people who admit this fact.  Substance dualism--the notion that mind and matter are metaphysically distinct despite being intertwined, the former immaterial and the latter physical--is true.  The problem with many substance dualists (the adherents themselves) is that they treat everything as if it reduces down to physical substance (matter) or consciousness (mind).

Despite its omnipresence in any sort of experience, consciousness is not and cannot be the most central aspect of reality.  There is one thing more foundational than consciousness, the only thing at the foundation of all else: reason.  Consciousness itself, whether human or divine, cannot exist without logic existing beforehand; the laws of logic are metaphysical prerequisites for consciousness to even be consciousness in the first place!  Identity is inevitably bound to logic, and not even a divine mind can escape its identity.  Since truth is a function of logic, and truth must exist for there to be minds or anything else, logic is at the core of all things.

Consequently, to say that mind is at the utter heart of all reality is dishonest at worst and incomplete at best.  Matter may not exist apart from conscious perception, even though it is impossible to prove this possibility correct.  Regardless, even the hypothetical impossibility of matter without mind would not mean that everything other than consciousness exists only within or because of a mind.  Logic does not depend on any consciousness, divine or not, while even the mind of God is inescapably confined in a metaphysical sense by the laws of logic.