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  • Our minds, and every thought they contain, do indeed exist in reality...What is “irreal” is the assumed veridical mapping of personalized fantasies onto general (perceptual) reality.
  • This principle is really just a statement of empiricism. Empiricism says that reality consists of perceptions or perceptual events. Now, the only way that perception can occur is through a processor which is capable of it...i.e., a percipient. Therefore, empiricism is really the statement that reality consists of an irreducible combination of percipient and perception; because perceptions include not only percipients but percepts (perceived objects, elements of "objective reality" supposedly independent of perception), it follows that reality also consists of an irreducible combination of percipient and percept.

But while this happens to be a very respectable philosophical thesis, that alone does not validate it. The British empiricists and their followers never got around to explicating their thesis, which encompasses many of the roots of modern science, to the required extent. However, they could easily have done so simply by exploiting its tautological nature. Again, in order to avoid your incessant complaints and ridiculous definitional hairsplitting, we will for the nonce replace this contested term "tautology" with generic logical necessity.

Let's elaborate on that a little. A logical tautology like not(A and not-A) is characterized by the fact that it remains true no matter what the variable A happens to signify. In other words, its truth is logically necessary. Now take a look at "Mind = Reality". Both M and R are variables in the sense that their contents can vary, but they also have distinct constant aspects - one is always "mental" (like a percipient), while the other is always real (like a perception, e.g., an act of scientific observation). The question is thus, are percipients necessarily conflated with perceptions?

The answer is both intuitively and analytically obvious, and it is unequivocally yes. You can't have a perception without a percipient. Therefore, we have what I've chosen to call an "analytic" or "semantic tautology" (you can call it whatever you like, but the CTMU is Langan's theory, and I believe that my choice of terminology closely parallels Langan's own). So that's it, Q.E.D.

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