What should the most parsimonious explanation of reality include in its assumptions?
Ideally, it should include only the things that we know for sure to exist. It should also exclude any made-up concepts. So, what are the things that we cannot be possibly mistaken about their existence? There is only one such phenomenon that I’m aware of: consciousness. Everything else are just concepts invented to transform our experience.
This topic is also one of the rare cases where a tautology can be extremely informative. Here is the relevant tautology: Anything that can be known or experienced is known or felt within consciousness.
This statement is true just by the definition of consciousness. But, let’s assume for a moment that there is a reality outside of consciousness. Can we even know about or verify the existence of this reality in principle? I haven’t heard of any suggestion how this can be even remotely possible. This statement may sound crazy. After all, haven’t natural sciences -especially physics- been extremely successful in making progress by completely ignoring consciousness? Can’t we confidently say that the quantum fields or particles are the basis of the universe regardless of the existence of consciousness? Am I not writing this post with the help of a technology resulting from this confident assertion?
Let’s investigate carefully what is going on here. We invented concepts like particles (or excitations of quantum fields) and assumed inanimate, rule-based interactions between them. As a result of these assumptions, we produced powerful technologies and transformations of our experience. Does that mean that those imagined concepts actually exist outside of consciousness? No, because we are only aware of how our experience are changed within consciousness as a result of playing with those concepts.
Any modern theory of physics -and all other fields of science which builds upon its concepts- falls short in terms of parsimony. Without a significant paradigm shift, they are not capable of explaining reality. Why? Because they don’t have any explanation to offer about the only phenomenon that is known to exist and the only condition where anything can be known: consciousness itself.
I suppose that any explanation that assumes the existence of anything other than consciousness and its modifications will have the same problem.