The Question of Causation Just saying everything is mental may in some sense be simpler than materialism or dualism, but I don't think it provides any deeper insights or amelioration to these issues. — Apustimelogist
You are missing the point. Husserlian Phenomenology is not at all concerned with material existence as it is focused on the experience of consciousness. It is not merely sayign everything is Mental it just does not care about material measurements -- the aim being to figure out an approach that can better ground science in subjectivity.
Husserl started as a physicist so he was not against empirical data at all.
What we are talking about in phenomenological terms is understanding how when we look at any given object of perception it is necessarily 'pregnant' (to use his term) with unseen aspects -- volume, back, bottm, side etc.,. When we look at other phenomena the same makes itself known to us, like with sounds. We cannot think of a sound that has no volume, nor a song that has no melody.
To Bracket Out the general material view we are used to allows us to reframe our experience and categorise it differently. This can then be used once we readopt material data and seek clues to how our subjective experience maps onto neural networks or not at all.
Replacing combination with emergence does not really solve much because they are similar issues. — Apustimelogist
Yes. It is no better than stating something like "I don't know how it works, therefore aliens!" The issue becomes one of reductionism -- something else Phenomenology puts its hand to.
We are talking about consciousness so it makes sense to start at the source rather than shift to what our consciousness constructs (that is a representation of other in the idea of something being something). The question of how we obtain a pciture of a World is where conscoiusness is most readily at work. My conscious being appreciates physics not the other away around.