Regardless of our selfish or narcissistic preferences, though, the flashlight in fact illuminates part of the outside world. It's the same with reason, scientific methods, and impartial or dispassionate frames of mind. The user isn't necessarily the same as the target or the object of the tool.

Of course, a pure monist wouldn't easily be able to affirm as much since there would be no spoon (as in The Matrix). If only pure consciousness is real and everything else is somehow phony or not worth talking about, the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity is problematized, to say the least.