Thread:User talk:Tmtoulouse/Bump: You know that obnoxious thing people do on the internet when they've said something and they feel they haven't been paid enough attention? I'm doing that./reply (18)

Well, my question then is this - how can you exclude Berkleyan idealism, when its observable predictions are identical to those of materialism? Furthermore, I'd suggest that the principle of parsimony favours idealism over materialism. The materialist universe contains a large amount of information, which can be divided into two parts: the information which, will at some point, be known or observed by some mind; and the part which no mind will ever know or observe. Arguably, the unknown information is much more than the known information. Materialism claims that this information exists, even though no mind will ever know it. For example, there is a planet in the Andromeda galaxy, and it is having a certain type of weather today, but it is quite possible no mind will ever know what that type of weather that is. Materialism claims this information exists, even though no mind will ever know it. Idealism does not claim that information exists, that only information that will ever be in some mind somewhere exists. According to materialism, unobserved things exist in particular states; even though no mind may ever know what that state is; according to idealism, things only exist in particular states if a mind knows they are in that particular state, and otherwise exist in a sort of state of mere potentiality, a superposition of all their possible states. Doesn't it then follow, that materialism is much more complex than idealism, because materialism posits the actual existence of all this unknown and unknowable reality? And hence, by the principle of parsimony, we should be idealists rather than materialists?