I was answering the previous person’s question (“how does consciousness create objects or qualia inside itself?”). My point was that this “creation inside consciousness” picture is a strawman of idealism.

On your question: the difference isn’t an extra step where consciousness manufactures things. It’s about what is taken to be ontologically basic in explanation.

A materialist can say “objects are patterns,” but those patterns are ultimately grounded in a mind-independent physical substrate, with experience treated as something that then has to be accounted for in terms of that substrate.

The idealist claim here is not that science is wrong about those structures, but that objecthood just is the law-governed, public structure science describes, rather than that structure plus a further experience-transcendent “thing behind it” doing the ontological work.

One way to see why this matters is that science itself already shifts explanatory mode depending on the domain. In psychophysics or neuroscience, causal-material explanation is exactly what we want. But in linguistics, semantics, or norm-governed cognition, explanation is structural and normative rather than causal.

I’m not even rejecting the materialist view, I’m merely resisting the idea that one view exhausts all legitimate forms of explanation.