Why I Don't Believe in Consciousness

I've lost friends over this because a denial of consciousness undermines a final refuge of the arrogance of selfhood: universal consciousness. But even most normal people are strongly insistent that consciousness is a real thing, a special thing, and that they possess it. The problem I have is that there's not only no evidence for it, but what people seem to be referring to as consciousness is explainable as an effect no more unusual, no less materialistically explainable, than water flowing downhill. Now I'm not going to get too far into the metaphysics of non-separation. At least initially, I'm not going to try to explain that, on one level, consciousness, being an aspect of the illusion of a subject/object separation of the wholeness, is itself illusory.