AIM Framework glossary
Audience-Removal Test
Canonical definition
The diagnostic procedure that tests for I-driven engagement, which persists under audience removal, by counterfactually removing the M-channel's social inputs (audience, observability, Status-relevance) while holding A-channel inputs (bodily state, deficit, security) and I-channel inputs (engagement-context, competence-pathway access) constant. A desire that falls away when the audience is removed is shown not to be Intrinsic, and is not thereby shown to be Mimetic: Mimetic Desire in its general case requires no audience, and the source of a desire that fails the test is settled by the Two-Question Diagnostic's elimination and read after acquisition in the Fallow Signature.
Explanation
The Audience-Removal Test is the architectural diagnostic for one of the two questions in the Two-Question Diagnostic. If the desire to do, own, or pursue something would persist if no one was watching and no one would ever know, the desire is grounded in I-engagement (the activity is rewarding for its own sake) or A-need (the deficit is real). If the desire evaporates the moment audience is removed, the desire is not Intrinsic, provided the people removed were neither the Object of the desire nor the route to its satisfaction; whether the desire is Mimetic is settled by elimination once the A-test has been applied, and the Fallow Signature confirms the reading after acquisition. Where the engagement is relatedness, the people are what the Intrinsic engagement is with, and where provisioning depends on being seen, the audience is how an Appetitive need is met (Chapter 8, Section 8.12.7); in either case the desire falls away with the audience without being Mimetic. Social engagement is read as Intrinsic where it would persist with no Status benefit attached and the relationship invisible to third parties (Chapter 7, Section 7.1.2). The converse does not hold over a short interval. Removing the audience removes M's live input but not the loop that holds an established Mimetic valuation: an established Mimetic valuation releases only once the withdrawal carries its loop below the release point, which lies below the point at which the loop ignited, and a valuation whose loop the withdrawal never carries that far persists without an audience (Chapter 4, Section 4.4.13.2; Appendix A, Section A.5.3). The templates the Thinker writes from the Belief Register also go on conditioning the Observer's Salience after the audience has gone. Persistence is therefore read across an interval long enough for the loop to release, and persistence that deepens with competence is the reading that separates I from a Mimetic valuation held in place by its loop. The test cannot be performed by introspection alone, because Source Opacity prevents reliable self-report; it is performed by behavioural observation across audience-present and audience-absent contexts. Where direct observation is not feasible, the test may be approximated by counterfactual imagination, with the limitation that imagination is itself subject to confabulation and audience-removal imagined under continuing M-coupling does not adequately represent genuine audience-absence.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Diagnostic; derived from the Three-Test Battery's Authorship test and the Wanting-Liking Dissociation.
Derivation
Chapter 7, Section 7.4.2; Chapter 7, Section 7.4.2.1; Chapter 7, Section 7.4.2.2; Chapter 8, Section 8.8.3; Chapter 8, Section 8.9.3.
Also in the entry
Source: Chapter 2 (Two-Question Diagnostic, Three-Test Battery entries); Axiom 3 (Source Opacity); Axiom 7 (Preconscious Transmission). Substrate specification. The test operates by counterfactual removal of the M-channel's social inputs while holding A-channel and I-channel inputs constant. Persistence under audience removal excludes M in its special case only where the interval is long enough for an established Mimetic valuation to release, and a valuation whose loop the withdrawal does not carry below its release point persists without an audience (Appendix A, Section A.5.3); persistence that deepens indicates I-attribution; evaporation indicates that the desire is not Intrinsic and leaves A and M to the deficit-state test and to elimination. The test does not directly distinguish A from I; the Two-Question Diagnostic combines the audience-removal test with a deficit-state test to isolate all three sources.