Recipe for becoming a Non-Realist

From: Lee Corbin <lcorbin.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 21:08:07 -0700

Recipe for becoming a non-realist.

1. Study your perceptions *introspectively*.

   This has several advantages. First, you are an authority
   (in fact, the ultimate authority) on your own perceptions,
   and so little in the way of humility will ever be needed.
   You can start out, as it were, from the top. Second, and
   best of all, none of your results can be refuted by anyone
   else: they're not at all falsifiable.

2. Use your *intuition* to arrive at various conjectures.

   The great advantage of this is that it sidesteps all the
   slow and painful work required learning real science, or
   making vulnerable conjectures about the real world. Your
   opinion on qualia, for example, is just as good as anyone's.
   
3. Publish your results (or at least tell anyone who'll listen).

   In this step you get to compare your results with those of
   fellow "researchers" to see if your words approximately match
   theirs. You all can come up with interesting and highly
   artistic descriptions of your subjective impressions, and
   you can admire and learn from each other's results.
   
4. Define your school.

   You can create various interesting labels for each of the
   differing opinions that obtain; since the number of opinions
   will equal the number of "researchers", everyone can
   democratically found his or her own school of thought.
   As a bonus, your creativity can be exercised. (This
   applies to steps 3 and 4 equally.)
   
Lee
Received on Thu Jul 28 2005 - 00:08:32 PDT