Nice post. I tend to think that solipsism of the sort you describe (a form of “subjective idealism”) ends up looking almost like regular materialism, just phrased in a different ontology. That’s because you still have to predict all the things you observe, and in theory, you’d presumably converge on similar “physical laws” to describe how things you observe change as a materialist does.
Which is to say that idealistic instrumentalism is as complex as materialistic instrumentalism. The complexity of the minimum ruleset you need to predict observation is the same in each case. But that doesn’t mean the complexity of materialist ontology is the same as the complexity of idealist ontology. Idealism asserts that mentality, or some aspect of it, is fundamental , whereas materialism says that is all a complex mechanism. So idealism is asserting a simpler ontology. Which itslef is pretty orthogonal to the question how much complexity you need to predict observation. (of course, the same confusion infects discussions of the relative complexity of different interpretations of quantum mechanics).
Anyway, I find these questions to be some of the most difficult in philosophy, because it’s so hard to know what we’re even talking about. We have to explain the datum that we’re conscious, but what exactly does that datum look like? It seems that how we interpret the datum depends on what ontology we’re already assuming. A materialist interprets the datum as saying that we physically believe that we’re conscious, and materialism can explain that just fine. A non-materialist insists that there’s more to the datum than that.
Yes. It’s hard to agree what evidence is, meaning that is hard to do philosophy, and impossible to do philosophy algorithmically.
Which is to say that idealistic instrumentalism is as complex as materialistic instrumentalism. The complexity of the minimum ruleset you need to predict observation is the same in each case. But that doesn’t mean the complexity of materialist ontology is the same as the complexity of idealist ontology. Idealism asserts that mentality, or some aspect of it, is fundamental , whereas materialism says that is all a complex mechanism. So idealism is asserting a simpler ontology. Which itslef is pretty orthogonal to the question how much complexity you need to predict observation. (of course, the same confusion infects discussions of the relative complexity of different interpretations of quantum mechanics).
Yes. It’s hard to agree what evidence is, meaning that is hard to do philosophy, and impossible to do philosophy algorithmically.