The question
How can radically private conscious lives belong to one reality?
The argument
Hadley proposes that individuality and a common ground need not exclude one another. A person’s experience remains private and consequential even if its ultimate conditions extend beyond the person. A shared physical cosmos is a weaker interpretation; a ground of consciousness is the stronger metaphysical claim.
The strongest objection
Naming one ground does not explain how separate first-person perspectives arise from it. Brain dependence remains a serious challenge to the stronger claim.
The response and its limits
The manuscript acknowledges this explanatory gap and does not treat materialism as defeated. The principle is a proposed metaphysical model whose explanatory obligations remain open.
What it does not establish
It does not establish telepathy, interchangeable persons, a collective accessible mind, or personal survival after death.
In the author’s words
Individual centers of consciousness may be distinct local expressions of one ultimate ground of consciousness without being interchangeable, reducible to one another, or known to share one collective mind.
The Inheritance of Existence, manuscript p. 188. Transcribed from the supplied manuscript; line breaks normalized.