Selfhood and consciousness pretty easy to take for granted, since we're situated in these for every moment we experience in our lives, but what are the nature of these things?

Elaborated on in more detail in my video series on the nature of reality:    • What is Existence? (Part 1 of 3)  

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Interesting, related links:
http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/0...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/...

I was asked to "elaborate on the jump from 'consciousness is a universal phenomenon' to 'therefore we are all the same consciousness'. Why is Consciousness experiencing my life, why isn't it my consciousness?"

Let's leave aside consciousness for a second and just think about the things that make you you. Your body is an enormous complex of particles configured into atoms configured into molecules, and these are swapped out all the time as you respirate and digest and excrete, etc. Particles are universal phenomena they exist in the exact same way unto themselves everywhere in the Universe, and the oxygen in your blood right now only differs from the oxygen in Betelgeuse through its location in space, (and its temperature and other things like that). It isn't your oxygen, it just happens to be part of you for this fleeting instant.

Now, many of these molecules are configured into your DNA. This is your DNA, in that it is entirely unique to you, but the actual foundation for that uniqueness, those molecules, is universal in nature. You could say that the potential for DNA to exist at all is a universal property, born of the laws of physics via chemistry. Your body and brain are enacted through the information stored in your DNA, hence the uniqueness of your body and brain. Again, however, the youness thus achieved is entirely the result of Universal processes; at no point is this complex chemical reaction anything other than a natural occurrence in the Universe.

Now then, if your consciousness is the product of your brain activity, and your brain activity is the ultimate product of the existence of your DNA in your living cells, and the existence of your DNA is ultimately the consequence of the existence of the Universal laws of physics, and no other causal link (supernatural or otherwise) has a role in the phenomenon, then by the direct result of Universal phenomena, your consciousness arises. The idea is that just as atoms are phenomena that are allowed by the laws of physics to exist given the right conditions, the phenomenon of experientiality is allowed to exist given the right conditions. The specific conditions under which that phenomenon arises are still expressions of one Universal property, but just as there are multitudes of atoms which fulfill the conditions necessary to their existence, there are countless brains which uniquely engage this universal potential.

So in a large sense, it is your consciousness experiencing life, in that such a perspective couldn't exist without you being here, but your consciousness is fundamentally the universal possibility for experientiality to exist.