Firstly, I have only just now noticed that you posted two consecutive responses a couple of days ago, and I only responded to the second. In the first, you write " conversely, if reality is taken to be fundamentally consciousness, then everything is consciousness... This position isn't subject to the hard problem since everything in reality is all just one thing, consciousness."[1] Well, we can also say that a materialist theory of consciousness would not be subject to the hard problem, because, in that case, there clearly isn't one, by definition! This is even before we get into the question of what, if anything, it means to say that reality is fundamentally consciousness.
Turning now to your latest post, in your third paragraph, you offer some sort of response to the knowledge argument issue, but it both misrepresents the full scope of materialist responses to the argument, and, more relevantly here, completely misses the point to which that argument is being used in this discussion.
While the latter renders the former moot, I will, for completeness, say something about it. Firstly, I know (from private correspondence) that Daniel Dennett considered "What RoboMary Knows" to contain the essentials of his response to the knowledge argument. In it, he argues that if we had a different neural architecture - one in which we could directly examine and modify the detailed physical state of our brains - then learning what it is like to see colors could be done discursively. The fact that we humans cannot do this is, therefore, a contingent fact of biology which poses no challenge to materialism.
Secondly, you are once again completely mistaken in your guesses about what I think. Personally, I don't feel that the opponents of materialism have shown that consciousness will prove to be inexplicable without new physics, any more than are other biological processes such as metabolism or reproduction. Dennett's response to the knowledge argument is not predicated on new physics, and (while I don't think they are very helpful) neither are the arguments from the phenomenal concepts wing. Part of the rhetorical genius of Jackson's argument is that it nudges readers down the path of thinking that materialism will need new physics to prevail, but, as shown above, no such conclusion is warranted.[2]
Thirdly, though I'm not positing any new physics, I can still note that your characterization of those views as postulating something "of which we have exactly zero evidence and that we might never discover" is rather breathtakingly ironic, given how you are going about justifying idealism. As for avoiding debating the subject to the point of sophistry, I think that would be very helpful here.
As I said, though, this is moot, as it misses the point. I had hoped to forestall this outcome by pointing out that the question I posed is not predicated on any assumption of the truth of materialism, but it seems I should have said more about why that matters, so I will do so now. The question is this: why does the knowledge argument, when cast in terms of complete knowledge of idealism, not establish that there is a hard problem for idealism, just as the corresponding physical-knowledge argument allegedly does for materialism? Instead of replying to that question, you have offered some sort of defense of the knowledge argument against materialism - but the more strongly you promote the latter, the more strongly you support the view that the corresponding knowledge argument against idealism needs a substantive response (I have, of course, just referenced an argument that it is not actually a problem for materialism, but if you were to seize on that argument for your own purpose, it would raise the question "what hard problem?" - if the best and arguably only argument for there being a hard problem is no more (or no less) applicable to idealism than it is to materialism, you cannot use it to establish that there is a hard problem for materialism alone.)
If idealism really does provide an explanation of consciousness, you should have no difficulty responding to this issue, but instead, we have circled around it three times now without getting any closer to a solution. As you yourself put it, the hard problem is the linchpin of idealism: without it, all your arguments for it being the only viable non-materialist option are beside the point. [3]
Well, so much for the third paragraph, but quite a bit of your latest reply is taken up with other, incidental, matters, such as whether at least some of your arguments amount to preaching to the choir. Let's look at a definition, and from Merriam Webster, we have "to speak for or against something to people who already agree with one's opinions." I think we can leave it to third parties to decide for themselves whether your claim that materialism is obviously false for those who "get" qualia (in the right way, of course) fits that definition.
Furthermore, when we put together your statements that, on the one hand, that you are are attempting to pull our collective heads out of the sands of implausibility and blow fresh wind to a more parsimonious direction to our cultural view of reality, while on the other, that you don't have to take into account (or, apparently, respond substantively to) the apparently awkward questions I have been raising, then we can see that you are more interested in the one-way delivery of ideas than in dialogue, which comes across as rather preachy.
Your posts have been moving in the direction of a motte-and-bailey argument. In your first paragraph of your first post in this thread, you were squarely in the bailey, writing "perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of "feelings". But for others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to self-validating and irreducible truths [my emphasis]. If you seriously go into this, the only possibilities left once you've dug and eliminated all mistaken assumptions are not material", but now, with "does matter give rise to consciousness? Mounting evidence points to the contrary", you have at least one foot in the motte. I am not, as you put it, after ironclad proof, just arguments strong enough to justify the certainty with which you have, at least up to now, presented idealism.
I thank you for your kind wishes in your last paragraph and I wish the same for you. I imagine you will have more success in that than I will, as I am quite demanding in what I expect in an explanation, and the mind is a hard problem, even if it is not the hard problem.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40479264
[2] Penrose has a different argument for that, one that is most commonly rejected on account of its assumption that materialism based on known physics entails that human minds must be logically consistent reasoners.
[3] At least one of those arguments - the one from parsimony - is problematic in its own right: the one and only essential property that any hypothesis of the mental needs in order to prevail is that it actually explains minds, and, so far, we have seen none from any position, materialism included (I am well aware that quite a few physicists think physics will continue to deliver parsimonious theories (The Elegant Universe, and so forth), but that, too, is a belief for which even the inductive form (so far, it has been that way) has a rather obvious confirmation bias problem.)