I suspect that even now, this fallacy secretly remains the foundation of physicalism. Of course, the problem with Johnson’s demonstration is that kicking a rock could occur just the same way in a dream or in our imagination. We can understand that a rock in a dream has no need to seem to be composed of physical substances like silicon or basalt. A dream rock may be ‘composed’ of one’s hard feelings toward the menial tasks being assigned to someone at work. Just being able to experience kicking a rock says nothing about that rock, or any rock being real in some other way besides the reality of the experience. All dreams are real dreams.

Being open to the idea of matter as imaginary in an ultimate or absolute sense does not have to bring us to solipsism or creationism. All that we know is that we can dream or imagine matter, but we do not know that it is our imagination that is responsible for all dreams, nor do we know that any person or super-person including ourselves or God is not also “imaginary”. All that we know is that imagination itself is real.

If I were to rewrite Decartes’ Cogito, I would leave “I” and “think” out of it and just say something like “everything can be an illusion of conscious experience except conscious experience itself”. From there, I might derive “Therefore there can be no escape from conscious experience except into another conscious experience.”. After all, if we say that we experience unconsciousness, we cannot have been completely unconscious. If we were, then we can only infer such a non-existent experience as an inference when we return to consciousness.

To sum up: