A dog or a cat or any other hunting animal, and perhaps even a spider, makes updating predictive maps of the world which incorporate themselves, their own position, movements, salience, revealed intentions etc., and so all the elements that go into self-awareness. Of course we credit at least the vertebrates with consciousness, interpret their behaviour intentionally etc., but not always with self-awareness. What is the difference? Less freely hypothetical perhaps, or not as creative with errors, fantasy, the intentionally irrelevant. But you also see dogs and cats as peaking into self-awareness at certain moments, but not sustaining it. and so it is with you too, peaking briefly into self-remembering and then falling back into complacent animal faith - 'scepticism' and animal faith - suspended between the two.

A relation to reality that is outside of thought and so inaccessible to thought, thought here meaning to cover all forms of representation. But you have to ask yourself if such a relation is possible and by doing so you would reduce it to something thinkable, to some relation that you can model or represent to yourself. If there was never any need to go beyond thought, or for the beyond of thought, closer in, that is than any thought, then this would be an idle speculation, but it is just the way that thought stammeringly admits its dependence, it lack of anywhere to stand.

Acting not from will or desire (desire is will with a subject, will is desire without a subject or with only an immanent one) but purely hypothetically, out of the consideration that you might be a subject, to see what follows from being as if a subject.

Only to be in simplicity so often comes as an image, part thought, part picture, part gesture and is assumed. You can't get behind that because it only yields more of the same, but wonder instead at the first or final container or receiver of that image, and so in walking and doing the many trite repetitions of a day, the subject changes but the subject of the subject remains, not behind but beneath.

This isn't it, this is what's blocking the way to it. The idea that this isn't it is just what this is; this is the idea that this isn't it Therefore this is it! - The only way to break the loop is to not break the loop.

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.