Okay, Ian, I've looked at that paper and glanced at others on the site. I'd like to be able to say that I've come away with a clear picture in my mind what you're trying to say and why it might refute Idealism, but sad to relate, I haven't. That doesn't mean that it
hasn't refuted it, only that I have little understanding, for the most part, of what you're trying to get at. In large part this is because you're a physicist or engineer (not sure which), and you employ quite a lot of technical terms and examples that I find it hard to grok.
Now and then, I find something that is a bit more accessible, such as:
Distinctions thus ought to be made between
the `Principal Cause': that disposition which operates,
the `Occasional Cause': that circumstance according to which dispositions operate,
the `Instrumental Cause': the origin of the occasional cause, so is another cause by means of which the Principal Cause operates.
The overall pattern is therefore that ``Principal causes operate according to occasional causes, which arise from instrumental causes''.
All three kinds of causes appear to be necessary for any event in nature, for example, when a stone is let fall: the principal cause is the earth's gravitational attraction, the occasional cause is our act of letting go, and instrumental cause is the muscle movements in our finger releasing the stone. Its hitting the ground is thus caused by our letting go, but only as an instrumental and then occasional cause. Many common uses of `cause' (including that of Davidson [1967]) refer to occasional causes rather than principal causes, as it is only in the occasional sense that events can be said to be causes. Previous events cannot be efficacious causes, Emmet [1984] points out, in the sense of `producing' or `giving rise to' their effects. The instrumental cause is a genuine causal contributor, and may be said to `set the stage', by making suitable conditions (namely, the occasional cause) for the operation of the principal cause.
Also:
From our examples, we may generalise that all the principal causation is `down' the sequence of multiple generative levels {A to B to... }, and that the only effect back up the sequence is the somehow the way principal causes still depend on certain occasions in order to operate. Let us adopt as universal this asymmetric relationship between multiple generative levels: that dispositions act forwards in a way conditional on certain things already existing at the later levels. We regard this as a simple initial hypothesis, and will have to observe whether all dispositions taken as existing in nature follow this pattern.
We may therefore surmise that A, the first in the sequence, is the `deepest underlying principle', `source', or `power' that is fixed through all the subsequent changes to B, C, etc. Conditional Forward Causation, the pattern we saw from physics, would imply that changes to B, for example, come from subsequent operations of A, and not from C, D,.. acting in `reverse' up the chain. Rather, the subsequent operations of A are now conditioned on the results in B, C, D, etc. The operations of A are therefore the principal causes, whereas the dependence of those operations on the previous state of B is via instrumental causation, and the dependence on the results in C, D,... is via occasional causation. It is now hypothesized that this is a universal pattern for the operation of dispositions in nature that do not follow from the rearrangement of parts of an aggegrate object.
I say "a bit" more accessible; but I'm still struggling as to what it says in relation to Idealism or Dualism or any other -ism, really. How does it refute Idealism, which wouldn't deny that there are patterns and regularities in nature? These might include the notion of Dispositional Essentialism, which you appear to be positing as a widely-applicable principle. For that matter, how would it refute Materialism? This isn't clear to me.
I think I'm going to need the Cliff Notes version if I'm going to be able to discuss this any further with you. Bernardo might have more of a clue because he's a scientist as well as a philosopher, but I'll have a bash if it can be made simpler.