The thesis of the uniqueness of our self-consciousness

I am toying with the thesis that each person’s self-consciousness is qualitatively different. Perhaps all persons have uniquely individuating properties, something like haecceities, and for each such individuating property there is a different quale of seeing oneself as an instance of it. One might even think the quale is the unique individuating property. Or, alternately, it might be that each person’s qualia are different: my quale of red is a quale of me-seeing-red, my quale of middle-C is a quale of me-hearing-middle-C and your quale of red is a quale of you-seeing-red while your quale of middle-C is a quale of your-hearing-middle-C. There is, presumably, something that all of my qualia have in common, and all your qualia have in common, and so on.

What consequences might there be of such a view?

First, some people have the intuition that there is something mysterious about self-consciousness, something that goes significantly beyond mere consciousness (pace my thoughts here). The qualitative conscious difference thesis could be a way of capturing that mysterious extra in self-consciousness.

Second, this would be a way to support and explain intuition of the non-fungibility and irrepeatability of persons. There is something irrevocably unique about all our perceptions of the world.

Third, we might get a neat account of second-person knowledge. What happens in second-person knowledge—very mysteriously!—is that we come to see that special qualitative feature of the other, albeit in a different mode, from the outside.

Fourth, the thesis might make one even more cautious about some thorny epistemological matters. There cannot be such a thing as two people with the same qualitative evidence: each person’s evidence must be qualitatively different from that of every other person. The concept of being an epistemic peer becomes dubious: you unavoidably see the world differently from me. The application of Bayesianism to fundamental matters becomes even more fishy. Plausibly, we have essentiality of origins, so that if there is a God, you and I couldn’t have existed in a world without God. On the qualitative uniqueness thesis, this means that there are qualitative features of our mental lives that cannot be exemplified in a world without God. We can then expect that we will have some trickiness when we ask questions like: “How likely is it that the evidence I have would obtain if God didn’t exist?” Similar issues come up for fundamental laws of nature. In particular, we cannot really do Bayesian reasoning on our total evidence, and we should probably see Bayesianism as a mere toy model.