It sometimes seems to me that those of us who actually have consciousness are in a minority, and everyone else is a p-zombie. But maybe that's a selection effect, since people who realise that the stars in the sky they were brought up believing in don't really exist will find that surprising enough to say, while everyone else who sees the stars in the night sky wonders what drugs the others have been taking, or invents spectacles.

I experience a certain sense of my own presence. This is what I am talking about, when I say that I am conscious. The idea that there is such an experience, and that this is what we are talking about when we talk about consciousness, appears absent from the article.

Everyone reading this, please take a moment to see whether you have any sensation that you might describe by those words. Some people can't see colours. Some people can't imagine visual scenes. Some people can't taste phenylthiocarbamide. Some people can't wiggle their ears. Maybe some people have no sensation of their own selves. If they don't, maybe this is something that can be learned, like ear-wiggling, and maybe it isn't, like phenylthiocarbamide.

Unlike the experiences reported by some, I do not find that this sensation of my own presence goes away when I stare at it. I do not even get the altered states of it that some others report.

I am also aware that I have no explanation for the existence of the phenomenon. Some philosophers have claimed that the apparent impossibility of an explanation proves that it does not exist, like a student demanding top marks for not having a clue in the exam. But for me, contemplating the seeming impossibility of the matter does not make the actual experience go away.

Here are some ideas about things that might be going on when people report that they have discovered they have no self. Discount this as you wish from typical mind fallacy, or compare it with your own experience, whatever it may be.

If you stare directly at a dim star in the night sky, it vanishes. (Try it.) Nevertheless, the star continues to exist.

If you stare directly at the sun all day, then for a different reason, you will experience disturbances of vision, and soon you will never be able to see it again. Yet it continues to exist, and after-images and blindness are not signs of enlightenment.

The sun appears to circle the Earth. When it was found that the Earth circles the sun, I doubt that anyone concluded that the sun does not exist, merely on the grounds that something we believed about it was false. (However, I would be completely unsurprised to find philosophers arguing about whether the sun that goes round the Earth and the sun that is gone round by the Earth are one thing or two.)

In the 19th century, Auguste Comte wrote that we could never know the constitution of the stars. Was any philosopher of the time so obtuse as to conclude that the stars do not exist?