If idealism is parsimony it is also intuitionistic or constructivist: whatever is serves coherence, or rather its individual being is its part in coherence. But nobody with any real intuition is an intuitionist, they are a more or less covert Platonist. Idealism is fine when it is punching downwards, against matter or the indiscernible object, but against Platonism it would have to punch up, where it turns out to have almost no force. More simply what is beyond mind, beyond the conspiracy of consciousness is in the subject not the object. This is where you have to let go of metaphysics. Idealism is the most pristine emanation of the metaphysical urge, and so in its way is Platonism. To make terms with super-essential Being or the great void you need a whole other language.

Idealism can be argued as following directly from the principle of parsimony - what is being the minimal ground for the experiencing and in a similar way the principle of parsimony can be seen to follow directly from idealism, in its grander cosmogonic sense. Thus the two are equivalent. There may also be an independent argument for parsimony: If positive being is not parsimonious then it consists of a parsimonious kernel, P plus some extra stuff, E, but P + E can be seen as parsimonious from a further perspective, that is from a deeper level of self: P + E = P', and so on. (E could be a 'forcing extension' of P containing uncountably many indiscernibles, but these are in fact discernible from a further position upstream of where P was taken to emanate from.) The point, however, is something else: that the existence of others, or alter-egos, is not adventitious but a direct consequence of there being anything at all. Perhaps even the apparently time-dependent number of such alters is a physical constant.

Some models of experiencing imply that the more of intelligence there is in an individual the more that consciousness there will be, the experiencing itself taking on a richer character. On the other hand a recurrent insight into self is that it is the same in all sentient beings. Taking the two together entails that consciousness is not fundamental but is a property, perhaps a defining property of the individual 'self'. You could say that this latter is a simulation brought about by essential self. This places the ultimate value outside of consciousness and so goes against the entire system or will of the individual which is driven in all ways and modes towards apotheosis, the desire that drives desire. Desire is finite but seeks the infinite; its goal in no way resembles itself; the end of appropriation is complete surrender.

Narrative self doesn't do justice to the individual soul. It's more like a condition for appearance, will and counter-will, a life ruled by desires, mostly mimetic and their equally mimetic frustrations. Somehow those constraints give rise to something rather solid-seeming, and the idea that the relative centre is or ought to be the absolute centre, which is the Cartesian error in a nutshell. The anti-Cartesian error is something else again.

Self - gives the sense of large double-door behind you, normally closed so that you are your 'self', but when it opens you fall back and back far behind the little lighted clearing you are in now, into a vast and velvet dark space, so this was self all along. The narrative self certainly has rich turns and mysterious unfoldings, it is narrative after all, but it's not actually self, only self-ish, rather charmingly self-ish. Again the odd thing is how easily this intuition develops; you want to love self, or feel that self is love, but there is no way this can apply to the narrative self which has no real substance, but that pure self behind appearances, indifferent to metaphysics, but still behind appearances, literally behind them...

The question of whether there can be consciousness without self or self without consciousness, which is largely, but not altogether, a muddle of ill-defined terms can be clarified somewhat by asking a simpler question. Can there be self without you? The answer that immediately arises is, of course there can! It's not that you have or are a self, or even that 'a self' makes any sense as such, but more like that you are a participation in self, and a pretty flawed one at that. It is self-ness that is wonderful, that is the substance of all experiencing, whereas your self is more like a project, incomplete and probably never meant to be complete, but simply a transient way in which self-ness can be made to appear. In this sense self-ness is another way of saying consciousness, but one that happily presupposes something much more than can be reduced to an oddly paradoxical emergent of mind.

Feeling and knowing are the two complementary originals, but which comes first? Is it feeling, or pure appearance, which would make of this a bottom-up process, or is it knowing which would make it top-down? You cannot have a feeling without a knowing what you feel, and you cannot have a knowing without something to know. The nature of the process is that this must be indeterminate, that's what it means for it to be twisted on itself, which is your fundamental intuition about being a presencing, a Da-sein, a Da and a sein. The feeling however is shallow, each feeling appearing just as it is, little specks of quality, while the knowing is a bottomless abyss having no limit to how much it can open like an endless flowering revealing layer after layer. This is why, in spite of the wonderful groundedness in things it cannot be bottom-up - there's simply not enough momentum in that direction.