I'm really puzzled about how to take your piece. Clearly you're well-read. However, I couldn't get enough traction from your piece to really evaluate your argument. I found it unconvincing, even though I might agree with the point you were trying to make.

You didn't seem to do justice to the ideas you attacked. It's possible you didn't get their nuances? It's possible you dismiss their nuances? Some people just constitutionally reject nuances. I don't condemn them for that, assuming they don't condemn me for paying attention to nuances.

It might be nothing more than how you handle the terms you use -- real, really, reality, interpretation, appearance, observation, experience, etc. I don't know what precisely you mean by those terms. Their meaning seems to change as you go along. So it would help if you define them. Perhaps you think they're self-evident? To me, that's an illusion. This could be the root of my issues. Every time you say "real" or "really" it feels rhetorical.

I'm glad we agree that experience is some kind of substrate. I think of it as *the* substrate. I don't see the need or point of positing anything further -- that seems like an a priori or metaphysical exercise like you reject -- it seems like a violation of Occam's razor.

I think pretty much everything -- reality, interpretation, perception, etc -- reduces to experience. I think when you bring in concepts like "real" it's easy to create useless distinctions that bog the discussion down, as it feels to me has happened here.

I'd be grateful for any clarification or additional thoughts you have. I admire the thought and work you put into this piece, and want to maximize my understanding of it. Thank you for reading my comments.