Mind over Matter

Mind and matter... O boy.  We get more than an earful about the nature of mind and matter this week with all this talk of substances and monads and duelists and pantheists and ists I’m not even sure what are.  What is all this even about though.  Well in one case we have Barkley, and why they named a town after him I’m not really sure because his basic believe was that the only reason things didn’t pop in and out of existence when we weren’t looking at them is because God is always looking at everything. Then we get the likes of Leibniz who thought that ever human being lived in a self-contained dream world, influencing without acting upon a sheared nonexistent world I guess, which conjures up a matrix like image of people in VR pods in giant tower banks somewhere. What does all this even mean though.  It all seems to go into great detail for one question and yet get very far away from it in the process.  The question is reality, what is it?  All their arguments get very far away I think, because they are irrelevant.  Say we are all just people in VR pods.  Yet if we die in this world we in our pods, if we feel pain in this world, we do in our pods.  If this world performs the functions of reality inescapably, is nonexistence valid or relevant if it is?  On the question of perceived matter, if God is always watching everything so it’s always there, does it really matter if it will be there if we’re not looking at it. I know this is philosophy, but it seems like a lot of missing the forest for the trees.