Yes, so your semantics of langauge make such questions incomprhensible.

It's like if someone said, "what's the radius of this circle?" and you had defined "circle" and "radius" such that circles could never possess such a property, so the quesiton itslef is incherent, just as, "what's the flavour of this circle?"

But my confidence that the question, "what was here before i existed?" has meaning, is greater than my confidence that it is completely incoherent. It plainly and obviously has meaning. Thus anyone selling a semantics for language which makes this question incomprehensible, despite it being perfectly comprehensible, is selling a defective system.

The issue is even more severe for idealists, because it isnt that question alone which becomes incoherent, but vast swathes of language that implicate even idealism itself. Meaninglessness is a kind of virus, which in the end, makes even idealism itself incoherent (since even to state the very terms it is stated in presuppose an objective background for these terms to refer to).

In any case, teenagers of the 1910s/20s thought it was a great thing to go around telling people ordinary questions with obvious meaninings were, in the end, completely meaningless and we were fooled by them all along. This didnt go well for them, as above, these positions themselves by their own critirea ended up meanignless too.

And in any case, the idea that it is a good thing that propositions whose meanings we readily understand should turn out to be meaningless is now correctly seen as a defect of any system proposed.

The obligations on these grand philosophical system are to answer to the meaningful, to take as a given the wide variety of propositions which are obbviously meaningful. Systems which "answer to nothing", and instead, in an adolescent way, delete knowledge and understanding in order to save themselves, are philosophically bankrupt.

Philosophy explains and answers the meaningful. It is only a technnique of analysis and argument, it has no power to determine what is true; only why, in some very narrow cases, what is true, could be so.