Does idealism explain experience or merely make it primitive?

{
 "schema_version": 1,
 "artifact_type": "argument_fabric_dossier",
 "question_id": "q:idealism-explain-or-primitive",
 "question": "Does idealism explain experience or merely make it primitive?",
 "why_it_matters": "This is the most common objection to idealism from physicalists and neutral monists alike. If idealism simply posits consciousness as fundamental without explaining why experience has the structure it does, it offers no advantage over physicalism. The question determines whether idealism is a genuine explanatory framework or a nominal redefinition.",
 "status": "live_crux",
 "resolution_level": "local_argument",
 "parent_questions": [
  "q:consciousness-fundamental",
  "q:hard-problem-status"
 ],
 "candidate_explanations": [
  {
   "candidate_id": "cand:idealism-explanatory-positive",
   "tradition_scope": "analytic_idealism_trika",
   "name": "Idealism as genuinely explanatory",
   "best_case": "Idealism explains the structure of experience through the self-articulation of consciousness. Manifestation has a logical structure (icchā-jñāna-kriyā) that explains why experience takes the forms it does. Consciousness is not a brute primitive but a self-differentiating reality whose intrinsic dynamics generate the phenomenal world.",
   "hard_to_vary_core": [
    "The inherent structure of consciousness (prakāśa-vimarśa) explains why experience is manifest rather than dark.",
    "The icchā-jñāna-kriyā triad explains the structural features of experience: desire to know generates intentional directedness.",
    "Idealism explains the unity of experience: all contents are modifications of a single field, which physicalism must treat as a mystery."
   ],
   "current_problems": [
    "The explanatory content of idealism must be distinguished from mere redescription: does icchā-jñāna-kriyā explain anything that physicalism cannot?",
    "Idealism must account for the specific regularities of nature (physical laws) without treating them as arbitrary or epiphenomenal.",
    "The account must explain why consciousness appears to be generated by brains, even if the appearance is ultimately deceptive."
   ],
   "falsifiers": [
    {
     "type": "prasanga",
     "condition": "A demonstration that every explanatory claim of idealism can be translated without loss into physicalist or neutral monist terms, showing idealism adds no content.",
     "status": "untested"
    },
    {
     "type": "empirical",
     "condition": "A complete neuroscientific explanation of phenomenal structure (binding, qualia differentiation, unity) that requires no conscious substrate.",
     "status": "untested"
    }
   ],
   "initial_status": "live"
  },
  {
   "candidate_id": "cand:idealism-primitive-posit",
   "tradition_scope": "eliminativist_physicalist",
   "name": "Idealism as primitive posit",
   "best_case": "Idealism simply names consciousness as fundamental without explaining why it has the structure it does. It provides no mechanism for the differentiation of experiences, their correlation with brain states, or their lawful behaviour. Making consciousness primitive is not an explanation but a refusal to explain.",
   "hard_to_vary_core": [
    "Positing consciousness as fundamental is methodologically identical to positing matter as fundamental: both are brutely given.",
    "Idealism offers no account of why consciousness differentiates into the specific contents we observe rather than any others.",
    "The correlation between experience and brain states is left unexplained: if consciousness is fundamental, why does it track brain function?"
   ],
   "current_problems": [
    "The objection equally applies to physicalism: making matter primitive is no more explanatory than making consciousness primitive.",
    "Idealism can appeal to structural principles (icchā-jñāna-kriyā, kañcukas) that physicalism lacks for explaining phenomenal structure.",
    "Physicalism has no explanation for why matter is accompanied by experience; idealism has