"You are effectively defining consciousness as your own consciousness alone." That is a good point, and it bothered me for some period of time, but there is a

"You are effectively defining consciousness as your own consciousness alone." That is a good point, and it bothered me for some period of time, but there is a way to resolve it. First, we have to recognize that "your own consciousness" is a dualistic framework that assumes that there is a subject (observer) and object (observed). If you do not assume experience to be "my experience", but rather experience that simply knows itself, then we can see that all experiences are simply known of themselves. When hearing a sound, there is just the sound. No hearer. When seeing the sight, there is just the sight. No seer. When feeling the sensation, there is just the sensation. No feeler. Why is it then that the feeling and the seeing seem to be occurring to "me" when they are in actuality simply occurring to themselves? It is because this self-known experiences are highly integrated with each other within this body. I assume that you too are having experiences that are not "happening to you", but are rather self known. So your hearing is just the heard. Your seeing is just the seen. Since "your" seen and "my" seen are not integrated, they appear to be happening "over there" and "over here". But, due to this lack of integration, I ultimately can not be sure that there are other experiences out there, but it seems like a good pragmatic assumption :-)