 There is, in fact, an obvious worry about using the notion of mind-independence to characterise realism: it appears to consign mental states and events to irreality. Surely your savouring the taste of espresso, say, is dependent on your mind if anything is? Moreover, just as certainly the nature and content of the experience of tasting espresso depends upon one’s beliefs and expectations. Indeed, but this is not what the ‘mind-independence’ characterisation of realism means to exclude. Rather, it is the existence of conscious events that is deemed to be independent of the particular opinions or theories we might hold about their existence —given conscious events do exist, were our descendants to uniformly dismiss them as illusory, they would be mistaken. The ‘mind-independence’ at issue is epistemic rather than ontological.