Experience of self occurs in a private language and communication and expression in the articulated and shared public language makes continual reference to the unshared private languages about which the question as to whether they have anything in common cannot properly arise - whatever is taken to be common is already public language. This view of the structure of experience is equivalent to the thesis that the so-called hard problem of consciousness is meaningful. But how can a private language be possible when a singular consciousness cannot verify that two instances of the same token are identical? Identity is the very basis of the private language but is incomprehensible in public terms because it transcends time and space - at best this can be gestured towards by saying that for the unconscious everything is simultaneously present.