Objective reality is, in a way, an extension and construction of the subjective experience – not the other way around. The subjective experience is the first person’s only experience and only possible experience. It is impossible for the first person to divorce himself from the first-person experience, for that would mean cleaving the singular, the indivisible, in twain.
What is so special about the self? What makes it unique, if it be unique? It may be true (and doubtless is) that a mind can be exactly replicated, in principle, with all its memories intact, using scientific techniques that are beyond the present skills of man, and the two resulting minds would be indistinguishable; but the experience of being the same person (it ought to be uncontroversial that the two minds represent the same person, in the objective world) is divided between two minds, and each mind has its own first person.
Sometimes it happens that the same person is said to harbor in his head the sense of selfhood of two different people. The psychopathology of this is largely unknown to me; but I am fairly certain that, though the same person may have multiple personalities, the sense of selfhood cannot but be unique to each mind, and non-overlapping with the others. They may drink from the same fountain of memories, be guided by the light of the same thoughts and impulses, but the experiences themselves transcend these, and are unreadable to each other.
I am fain to propose, in this regard, that the sense of selfhood adverted to heretofore is a level of abstraction deeper even than the mind, which itself is a level below the brain, the objective basis for that which in the objective world is little more than an illusion. I am not proposing that there exists a soul. That concept still seems too fantastical, and indeed, unnecessary in this discussion. I am saying that there must perforce be something akin to a soul, something so incommunicable that it may well be abstract, the bed upon which rests the most basic, inchoate sense of selfhood, the first person; but that something would still be entirely the construction of the mind, which in turn would be an epiphenomenon of the nonliving, uncaring laws of nature that operate within the brain.
May one therefore infer that percepts are the only basis of reality, as the mind constructs it? I think not. Those whose senses have been impaired from birth certainly may be thought to have a narrower sense of reality than those whose senses are not; but can the one all-encompassing subjective reality truly be inferior to the other? On what is our comparison based? Consider this:
If I have been blind from birth, I cannot conceive what it must be like to see; yet I know that sight must be something, inconceivable as it is, for others claim to possess it. I do not know what this strange skill is; but I am certain, insofar as I am certain that others exist, that I lack the preternatural ability to know in advance the nature and positions of the physical objects around me that they possess. The sense of sound, which instinctively strikes one as a weaker sense than that of sight, would therefore be even more difficult to conceive.
Could it then be that mankind as a whole lacks a certain sense that would enable it to perceive certain facets of the universe that are otherwise entirely unknowable? We do not usually make a fuss about this, because it is not necessary: the lack of this hypothetical sense does in no way impede man in his quotidian activities, for there exists no superhuman that we know of who has a decided advantage over his kin in perceiving the world. If the entire world were blind, no one would make a fuss about not being able to see.
You may insist all you like that if I succeeded in cloning you, memories and all, then there is nothing in the external world that would help to distinguish the one from the other. But how can you deny that in your own first-person experience you are not a different person? If I tossed a coin and decided to kill either the clone to my left or the clone to my right, your life would end if I picked you, while the sigh of relief you would emit when you saw me turning to the other would be audible for miles. This is obvious.
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