Subjective Realism
The surrounding world—the world in the broad sense of the word—exists objectively, entirely independently of any subject's will. Yet for each of us it acquires reality only as, and to the extent that, it is reflected in our consciousness. The unknown, for all its reality, seems not to exist until we come into contact with it in some way. And because each of us is physically and psychologically unlike the others, our perception of our surroundings is as individual as the person receiving it.
All phenomena registered by the first signalling system are imprinted in a strictly individual way, as are particular experiences and all the knowledge acquired throughout life. Each person therefore inhabits a unique world of their own creation, corresponding to their personal characteristics: the particular nature of their perception, the depth of their innate associative and analytical abilities, and their capacity to retain incoming signals, which determine how well informed they are and how effectively they handle the information received.
A world formed on this basis cannot help being profoundly subjective. No one else can reproduce it identically, and others can comprehend it only partially and provisionally, in part because of the imperfections of our means of communication, which severely limit both expression and perception. They allow us only to sketch and articulate the contours of our sense of the world; however much we may wish otherwise, they do not allow us to reveal it adequately and make it fully accessible to others. Everyone is therefore, by definition, a thing-in-itself, a psychological and emotional iceberg, only a small part of which is visible and tangible to those around them. However much we may desire a deeper mutual understanding, another person's soul remains a mystery. In the rare cases when minds and souls happen, by chance or Providence, to be in some degree attuned, we speak of the true luxury of human communication. Despite all these, alas, objectively insurmountable limitations, there nevertheless exists an affinity of souls that defies analysis, whose causes are unknown, drawing them unconsciously towards one another.
How, then, does the psychological and emotional consensus that unites society come into being? A degree of shared understanding of everything around us, and accordingly our integration into society, is achieved through the second signalling system: in other words, we reach agreements on matters both small and large, standardising our conception of a given phenomenon, adapting it for shared perception and adapting ourselves to it in turn.
The paradox of subjective-objective incongruity: when someone disappears, their entire world, the whole individual universe they have recreated, vanishes like a soap bubble. For everyone else, however, this is not a universal catastrophe but merely a sad event, proportionate to the stature of that person and to how others perceived them.
I seem to remember having written before that, in my view, there are two subtypes of memory: structural memory, conservative and genetically encoded, determining the organism's morphological characteristics; and functional memory, which determines our consciousness and thought processes and is governed by labile connections between neurons. Their first-order combination is a letter; the second, a word-concept; the third, a combination of such words—still larger constellations of neurons—forms a thought, and so on. The lability of these functional associations is one reason why we cannot reproduce even our own verbal construction exactly, yet fully retain its meaning. Everything is, of course, much more complicated, but the infinite variability and brain-wide reach of the processes of thinking are nonetheless quite evident. A. S. G.