Who says you do not?

Just because you may not be aware of it at this time does not mean you don't have it.

I can only speak of my own experience

Well, that experience can change. You might experience a different tune someday.


I recommend a month of meditation on a remote Himalayan mountaintop.



Or several sessions with LSD.



for starters.

but then I might as well assume the existence of God, or the spaghetti Monster, as I haven't experienced those either

[eta: in response to iSm's post about "affected by" vs. "determined by"]

What is it determined by? And more to the point, what necessitates that there be something else that it must be determined by? What about the physical universe is insufficient for producing thought, when we can demonstrate such a direct link between brain chemistry and thought?

I say determined by and I mean determined by. The thought that you have that affects the thought the thought that you're about to have was affected by the thought previous to that, which was affected by the thought of your neighbor which led them to put a red curtain in the window viewable from your front door instead of blue, which was affected by the thought his cat had before knocking the crate and barrel catalog off the table so that it landed open to the page showing a room with red curtains, which was affected by the gust of wind 10 seconds earlier, etc. etc. etc. until everything is affected by every single atom, every single proton, every single quark, every single bit of everything that has ever existed and ever will exist. Yes, determined by. On such a unfathomable vast scale that we have no choice but to abstract that determination down to where it LOOKS like "affected by" rather than "determined by", but make no mistake, at some point it all comes back to the same thing - recreate the absolute identical state of the universe at any point down to the finest sub-atomic Heisenbergian detail and hit play, and you will get the same result.

You can't see infrared light, but there's some pretty good evidence it exists. There is simply no mechanism for your consciousness to communicate directly with others', it doesn't have the necessary sensory input (and any connectedness is many many many many orders of magnitudes weaker than the connectedness your consciousness has with the various parts of itself, so there's not much reason for it to bother evolving such sensory input).

Any computer connected to the internet is connected to every other computer on the internet, but they do not act as one computer, nor do they have any access to the internal workings of any other computer.

Right but that infra-red light I can infer from my experience (i.e, by conducting an experiment). And I can communicate to other people, see photos of things they see, and yet don't experience them as a "self." I only know of my own consciousness, and can only assume it of others - if there is no distinct self, why would I experience one?

Yes, you can communicate with others, but that's external communication, distinct from the kind of communication your internal feedback loop provides to itself. You don't experience them as a "self" because they don't have access to the internal communication methods between your specific cells and brain structures that those systems interpret as "self". They feel "different" because they do not provide the same input into your system as your own consciousness does.

Perhaps if there were a way to link 2 people at a neural level, to where their neurons were receiving input from each other, we WOULD see a break down of the walls of self.

Actually, just wait a few years until these two girls' language skills improve (they're reportedly a little bit slow on the developmental milestone scale, but progressing steadily). They might be able to provide do a better job of explaining than me.

I have faith in science.

I simply don't agree. And I'm pretty sure there's no science to back up that particular assertion of yours. But of course, that would solve the question right there. Because I contend (and likewise cannot prove) that if you created an identical universe down to the finest sub-atomic mush and hit play, you would get different results.

Just out of curiosity - what do you (or anyone wishing to reply) make of the fact that something is either a particle or a wave depending on whether it is observed by someone with consciousness?