What's your explanation for all this that's "simpler" than solipsism?
"Consciousness exists" and "it's hallucinating" is much simpler and requires far fewer assumptions than any material explanation for the existence and behavior of the universe that I'm aware of.
This isn’t true. A hallucination of a reality is necessarily more complicated than a reality. A brain that can simulate physics is more complicated than physics.
What brain?
You mean the brain you're assuming you have based on an experience you think your brain is having? Do you see how that's a circular assumption? It's kind of like "the bible is the word of god, because the bible says so." You wouldn't depend on the information provided by the bible as a reliable source of validation for the information content of the bible. Why would you depend on the information provided by your brain as a reliable source of validation for the information content of your brain?
Let me re-quote myself:
"Consciousness exists" and "it's hallucinating" is much simpler and requires far fewer assumptions than any material explanation for the existence and behavior of the universe that I'm aware of.
That consciousness exists is empirically observable:
Are you having an experience? (y/n)
If the answer is yes, you can confirm that you are having an experience. That doesn't therefore imply that your experience is representative of an external reality or that your interpretation of that experience is valid. It doesn't imply what "you" are or what it is that is doing the experiencing. Material explanations for the universe cannot be logically deduced from observable experience. Positing a material universe require a whole bunch of assumptions. For example, that your experience is an accurate representation of the world, that there's even a "world" that you're experiencing, etc.
"Consciousness exists" and "it's hallucinating" is much simpler and requires far fewer assumptions than any material explanation for the existence and behavior of the universe that I'm aware of.
A hallucination of a reality is necessarily more complicated than a reality. A brain that can simulate physics is more complicated than physics.
Even if we assume a material universe, assume that brains do exist, etc, the brain would be a construct of physics operating within physics rules. Saying that the brain is "more complicated than" physics is kind of like saying a lego house is more complicated than legos. I'm not entirely sure what you even mean by that. My best guess is that you're proceeding from some sort of low to high level programming language analogy in the context of a language becoming complicated enough to write a compiler for itself. Which is not a good analogy for this situation.
Within the context of our particular observable universe, a (single brain's worth of experience of a universe) clearly involves less complexity than (our entire universe for that brain to experience.) If nothing else, simply because of the scales involved. If you're simulating a brain, there's no need to simulate what's going on in those couple billion galaxies over there. There's no need to simulate what's going on around most of the ~100 billion stars in this galaxy. There isn't any need to simulate what's going on in the vast majority of space around this star.
There isn't even any reason to simulate what's going on 100 feet beyond your vision. All you need to simulate is what's being experienced.
For example, the data content of this post that is reaching you is much simpler than the complicated biological organism with trillions of cells that you assume to be writing it from a complicated computing device over a complicated internet, isn't it? The experience that you're having right now, isn't it far simpler than the complicated biological organism you posit yourself to be, capable of processing data from an external world and translating it
into that experience?