Abstract

Of course private-public terminology has a certain first-hand obviousness for us. No one does my experiencing for me; there are features of myself evident to me simply by virtue of the fact that I live through them. These features are not available in quite the same way to others. And your situation is the same. Meanwhile we all have the same sort of access to what we can see and touch and explore scientifically, i.e., the public common world. These remarks must not be taken to imply that a human's privacy is identical with awareness or with immediate feelings; privacy is not exhausted in consciousness. Nevertheless the importance of the private-public distinction à propos actualities is its promise for clearing up or at least clarifying many puzzles involving consciousness: problems about perception, mind-brain connections, and even perhaps immortality. At least the distinction is promising if you begin by taking us to be indeed individual centers of an awareness which discloses some private content but also discloses real other bodily beings. That is, something like Weiss's conception of private and public or inside and outside seems to be essential if one holds that mentality has a firm non-dubious place in the natural world.