Hi Sam

Thank you for your reply.  I get the impression our views are in fact not far apart.

My problem with 'intuitive'  etc, just to be clear, is that, to my mind, arguments in philosophy, apart from minor, self-evident ones, should always be supported by reasons - which of course may not turn out under criticism to be good reasons but that is another matter.  'Intuitively', or locutions like 'That just seems weird', are not reasons in my view.  If I were king for a day I would ban them from all philosophical discussion forthwith (along with, in my own area of interest, the word 'aesthetic'). 

My problem with 'constituted' is probably dealt with by what you say in your second para - if I follow you properly. The word seems to imply - or could be taken to imply - that we can sensibly speak of the world as made up of some basic physical item (or items if we are not monists).  But the mind, or consciousness, (for example) may not in this sense exist at all - i.e. it may not be a 'constituent' at all - because it may not pass such a test (and the fact that it seems to disappear 'into thin air', so to speak, when we die is at least one reason for thinking so.)  So here we seem to be faced with something that at one and the same time, exists (because we seem to sense it does) and doesn't exist (because it will probably never pass any physical test for existence). This incidentally is why I am always annoyed by the phrase the 'ghost in the machine'.  It seems to imply that the only valid test of existence is a physical one and that any other form of existence must be supernatural - in the comic book sense of ghosts etc.