Under scientific naturalism the reality of events depends on their conformity to laws and repeatability under prescribed conditions, etc., so the elements that make them up, fields, molecules and so on are all perfect instances of a well-defined type and hence they are ideal. This kind of naturalism is idealism without knowing and without ever admitting it. Under idealism events depend on affinities which ultimately go so deep as to encompass the entire field of reality, and hence events are never perfectly repeatable, any such notion makes no sense at all; if you admitted fields and molecules you would have to add that each instance was incomparable to any other instance precisely because the context will have changed. Thus idealism ends up in the situation thought to be definitive for materialism. Both are ideas and the dialectic between them is a matter of turning a key. The aim is to align it perfectly with the keyhole. That's the most you can do. Pushing it in and opening the lock must come from some other agency outside the system.

The difference between idealism and materialism amounts to topology. It is in how the objects or furniture of experience is internally ordered, or a matter of the possible pathways that can be taken between distinct positions. If the thing is equivalent to the idea of the thing then this ordering goes along lines of similarity or archetype, otherwise it is along purely historical and literally contingent lines. The first means that something like magic must be effective, at least if you are able to go deep enough, otherwise certainly not etc. But, of course if materialism is itself and idea, then it would only amount to the claim that all effective lines of relation must be 'factored' through the idea of an external world, which idea itself has its own ideal relations to other cosmic paradigms. Simple arguments won't work, but there is no knock out.

Solipsism is either rude or neurotic, or both at the same time, but it is so only in relation to those salient versions of the self that come with social and physical reality. It is not, however, meant as a part of a theory of everything, which at best would only be an inverted solipsism, that is the need to comprehensively explain an accepted version of the world. It is more akin to a phenomenological reduction than a kind of fact. It is a matter of the place from which all assumptions are not undone but seen in a different light, as if they had no implications whatsoever. What is suspended are not metaphysical presumptions but the logical mechanism that links them together.

The sole purpose of idealism is to do way with the belief in world outside of the experiencing, a belief that is strongly motivated by the consistency, surprisingness and inexorability of the physical world. Any version of idealism which solves this problem by means of a splitting of consciousness into something that is functionally a world mind for the objective and experiencing minds for the subjective, fails to achieve this because this world mind is essentially the same as the putative material world. Systems of this kind fail to explain what is essential. Idealism ought to be a disposable tool, and as such it must be all from the inside. It must go through the needle's eye of solipsism.

Consider the constitution of the ongoing experience out of prima undifferentiated oneness as made solely out of distinctions, and so as a binary branching tree of infinite or near infinite complexity. The distinctions are not made relative to the same level of reality, as between red or blue, or solid or liquid, mental or physical, where each can be defined. Think rather of the Kantian distinction of transcendental and phenomenal, or more simply of game designer and game player, where the former creates the rules by which the latter forms a world, and for whom the rules are invariant as long as the play demands that they continue so. Call these two types of branches T-branches and P-branches, and say that every branching has more or less this T or P character. In those that are metaphysically 'upstream' these characters are very different but, later, downstream, they are quite subtle. Say also that there is an affinity, a mysterious unity among all T-branches and also among all P-branches. Then see what this says about what are phenomenally experienced as individual minds.

You don't know what consciousness is, or even whether the name properly refers to anything, whether say, it can be 'isolated and cultured' out of the mass of 'experience', but taking it as something like the largest possible container that is still a container, it would seem that it is worthwhile to attempt to determine its geometry by putting more and more complex objects into it and seeing whether it shows a strain, and if so in what way. This seems to be what happens with artistic or cultural products which become more and more self-conscious, which incorporate their own meta-perspectives in more and more complex and dizzying spirals. For a while it could seem as if consciousness itself was expanding, expanding in place like space in cosmology. It seemed that way up until it became overt and then collapsed with the 'green meme'. All of that effort and consciousness did not expand at all, if anything it shattered, or rather the experimental apparatus shattered. Consciousness was entirely unchanged. That ought to tell us something, but what?

There are the questions, or the one question that you think of as at the core of your being, and whatever it is it is bigger and more enduring than you are. It is a question many have asked at every time and place and some have held it central and gone further than you, and other have done other things with it. So, in a sense it is not your question, rather that you belong to the question, you are a moment in its history. As such you are not central to it, you will not 'solve' it, but you serve to keep it in play, and not without distorting it as well, turning it off centre. And in as much as you are in this way an enemy of the question your work is balanced by some other enemy whose thrust is the opposite of yours. But at the same time as you are a false friend to this question you are the true embodiment of another question, one that is hidden, and more 'gnarly', as they say. This just as you can be a supporting character in one story and at the same time the hero of a different story. These stories are woven together in yet another story. And so on.