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