Constraint and Explanation in a Minimal Ontology: From Solipsism to Conatus

This paper develops a minimal ontology that reconstructs the conditions under which structural realism becomes possible without presupposing an external world. Starting from a solipsistic point of departure, understood methodologically as the minimal first-person givenness of non-collapsing persistence, it derives the necessity of constraint and introduces its minimal realization as a constraint structure C=(X,R). From this, epistemic locality follows: each operational array has access only to a local substructure of the constraint structure. Under this condition, explanation takes the form of local constraint reconstruction while preserving the space of still-unexcluded possibilities, and explanatory adequacy is introduced as an ordering over constraint-preserving reconstructions. Such reconstruction cannot be completed within a single operational trajectory. It requires comparison across operational arrays and is stabilized through the reduction of collective structural error. From this structure, conatus is derived as a necessary trajectory-level condition for persistence under constraint, formalized through the coordinate system (A,I,W,η) as a minimal decomposition of non-collapsing persistence. Action and morality are then reconstructed as structural dynamics over this coordinate system rather than as products of external normative primitives. This framework connects minimal ontology, epistemic locality, explanation, collective reconstruction, science, and conatus within a single constraint-based sequence, and treats identity, quantum interpretation, and formal incompleteness as robustness tests of the gap between local access and global constraint structure. [Notice] A Korean translation of this paper is available at:10.5281/zenodo.19952814