But why is it you that is organism A? And why are you not organism B? Or why are you there at all, why do you exist in the world of A and B? The world may need organisms A and B to be what it is, but it does not need you. You need the world, to be there, to exist. And 'you' means 'I'.So we look at the evidence. And we see that subjective experience in critters like ourselves manifests as a unified field of consciousness, with a sense of self moving through space and time with a specific point of view. And that the experiential states correlate to neural states, and neurons are linked to our integrated sensory organs, motor functions, organs and so on. So it appears that consciousness manifests in discrete physical units (individual bodies) and is experienced in a way which correlates as discrete physical units (individual selves).
Someone may say that this is just playing with words, but it is not. The validity and adequacy of the materialistic interpretation of consciousness depends on these questions, and on understanding the meaning of these questions.
Good questions, and because we don't understand consciousness we don't have complete settled answers. But we can look at the evidence. Here's how I see it -
We have a story about the origins of the universe based on the evidence, which strongly suggests the universe existed before conscious creatures existed. Every piece of evidence suggests this. Before that is a blank.
Then we have the story of life emerging, and consciousness eventually and gradually emerging via evolution. So lets imagine that first creature which had some sort of subjective experience. Perhaps its autonomic reflex systems 'felt' vibrations, or 'saw' a change in light, which caused its reflex motor systems to skitter away from danger, something like that. It's hard to imagine such a creature had a sense of itself as an 'I' in any way we'd recognise. Do you believe the universe sprang into existence fully formed in that moment? Background radiation, fossils and all? Or did it ping into existence with monkeys, neanderthals or humans, or just you? Or are there as many universes as there are 'I's?
Well back to the evidence. Creatures evolved with increasingly complex neuronal systems giving rise to a variety of experiential states. Sight, sound, hunger, lust, etc, all evolutionarily useful properties, all correlated with with distinguishable body-unit systems, but becoming integrated in a central location in the body-unit brain. So that neurons in one system can 'spark' not only the associated useful motor responses, but neurons in connected systems. And eventually we have sophisticated and incredibly complex humans, who we know do have a unified sense of self, see ourselves as individual 'I's. Who have systems like memory, the ability to imagine scenarios and plan, reason, reflect and self-reflect, etc - what we call higher cognitive functions.
All separate but integrated systems, evolved for utility, located in discrete body-units (a human being). To help each body-unit remember where the fruit tree was, plan a hunt predicting the prey's responses and appropriate counter-measures, working out how to build a shelter, reading other humans as independent minds and predicting their behaviours, remembering who is a reciprocating cooperative ally and who is untrustworthy, etc. To survive and reproduce.
Now imagine trying to do those useful things if all your sensory perceptions, sensations, memories, imaginings, etc were flashing through your mind in a cacophanous jumble as neurons sparked each other. Perhaps like how it feels to be a newborn baby whose neural networks are largely unformed. It would be a useless kaleidoscope of confusion. So my belief is that alongside the evolution of these useful systems is the evolution of neural mechanisms which filter, focus and cohere these separate but integrated systems, and there is some evidence of this. So highly complex creatures like us can make sense of what they mean, create useful models of the world and ourselves which we can use to navigate towards goals. Resulting in this sense of a unified self with a unified field of consciousness located in space and time with a specific point of view. An 'I'.
There is no mini-me homunculus located in the brain watching it all play out on a screen and directing the action, it doesn't work that way. Never-the-less brains create a sense of a coherent 'I' which is located in this body, and a coherent model of the world 'out there' which follows predictable patterns which I can tell coherent stories about. That's how these complex systems evolved to work together in an evolutionarily useful way, imo. 'I's evolved based on evolutionary utility. That's my lay interpretation of the evidence, and I'd be surprised if something like that doesn't turn out to be the case as we learn more. We don't need to go the transcendental route to explain 'I's, if we follow the evidence.
Does something like that make sense to you?
If so, it takes the mystery a step back, to something more fundamental than the existence of I-Subjects doesn't it? Or the existence of the Big Bang? To areas we really can't claim any knowledge imo, like why is there something rather than nothing, why is that something 'stuff' and 'experiencing'?
Isn't the problem with this that there is more than one Subject?The basic axiom of existence is this: If I cease to exist for good, also the world ceases to exist for good, and even so that it has never existed. This is self-evident for me, in the spirit of Descartes.
However, it is clear and obvious for everybody that my death does not mean the end of the world.
Therefore, it is necessary that I, as a manifestation of subjectivity, as an individual subject of some kind, must be in the world as long as the world exists, and that means for ever, because there is no such thing as nonexistence. This is what I mean by the universal and fundamental character of the subject-object relation, and the postulate that the subject is the precondition of all being.
You could postulate the world exists only in relation to you if there was only one subject, you, because you couldn't know otherwise. But if you accept that other Subjects exist <Gertie waves!> with Subject-Object relationships with the world, then the world doesn't only exist in relationship to you, perhaps as a hallucination or illusion. It must exist independently of you. And independently of each other subject too. No? Which is also what all the evidence suggests, once you accept that the world you perceive is real and you can roughly know things about it.