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Wednesday, 15 March 2017



The psychological accomplishment known as reality-testing is a prototype for the scientific outlook, but differs from it in that it is, in principle, compatible with a wide range beliefs about the relationship between consciousness and reality. It is not a belief but a meta-belief which acknowledges the contamination of external perception by subjective beliefs, hopes, expectations etc., in sum by subjective furniture, and in this sense it is what conditions the arisal of the very concept of the subjective. Even if the reality you wish to assert is thoroughly magical it still needs to clear the hurdle of reality-testing in order to carry any sort of conviction. Reality-testing is perhaps best viewed as an intuitive methodology, and as such it may carry with it an intrinsic bias against the magical and the mythical, but as the beginning of a systematic critique of the objective/subjective distinction it may also contain a bias against the purely objectivist or scientistic outlook as well. In the pursuit of perfect rigour the pursuit of the idea that there is no relationship at all between consciousness and reality threatens to destroy both notions. What remains is only the tester, or rather the testing.

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