I read all the time. It’s a form of communicating information which is as useful to me as anyone else. What is puzzling to me is why someone needs to talk to themselves. Who is talking to whom? If you are truly talking to yourself don’t you already know everything you are putting into words and now just making thought more complicated by trying to represent with words things which may not be well captured by language? What’s the point of telling yourself something? In order to communicate it you already had to understand it so why then mentally speak it? Bizarre.

I definitely don’t agree with the idea that an internal monologue is consciousness. This would make the existence of consciousness dependent on the ability to use language. And you are correct, I am one of those 7%.

Not sure there is any evidence to support what you suggest to be true. Sounds more like a desire to believe there is more to “being” than just basic biology, which is natural, but not supported by evidence.

You and I appear to have different understandings of the brain and the nervous system. You speak of consciousness and memories as things in the brain. I view them as products of neural activity. The self is the functioning of the brain. If you can recreate all of the circuits and how they interact, you have recreated the self.

Not sure I am following you here. I feel as if you are implying some “ghost in the machine” as if being able to perfectly replicate what the brain would do in response to specific information isn’t sufficient to recreate the self.

You would have to be far more specific about the term “you” to have a fair discussion about this topic. I am reminded of the comedian Stephen Wrights joke that someone broke into his house and replaced everything with an exact duplicate. He couldn’t believe it ‘everything was exactly the same.’