A Conscious Universe

[bennyboy]

As for which is more rational, it would make sense that a more accurate representation of reality will provide more accurate predictions. As far as I'm aware, idealism only predicts qualitative observations, nothing quantitative.

Why? Numbers are ideas. So, as we experience them, are gravity, objects, and their interactions. Every measurement we make involves a subjective experience: holding a ruler, looking at it, etc. Unless you are saying the ego interacts directly with a ruler, then even a physicalist view of objects as we experience them is that they are mental representations, i.e. ideas. The question, at its core, is whether ideas are just descriptions of underlying "stuff," or the "stuff" is the experiential expression of underlying ideas. It seems to me that things like gravitational fields support the latter view better than the former.

Physicism makes quantitative and qualitative predictions. Hence, physicism is more rational because it's predictive capability is higher.

Maybe. But there's a qualia-sized hole in the physical view of reality. This is not surprising: an explicitly objective model of reality is going to have a hard time explaining subjective reality.