But why does that feel like anything? I could write a program that concurrently processes its visual input and its internal model. I don't think it would be conscious, unless everything in the universe is conscious (a possibility I can't, admittedly, discount).
More of "because you are a continuous chemical reaction that started 4 billion years ago". A bunch of legacy crap gets left around from the time before higher order thought when the brain - muscle interactivity was just based on feelings.
If we had all those animals, especially those around the time of the cambrian explosion to experiment on as they developed it would probably make more sense in the 'but it does' department. This is also why your math teacher wants you to show your work.
Consciousness is an attention mechanism. That inward regard, evaluating how the self reacts to the world, is attention being payed to the body's feelings. The outward regard then maps those feelings on to local space. Consciousness is watching your feelings as a kind of HUD on the world. It correlates feels to things.
Just wait till you hear Geoffrey Hinton’s “little pink elephants” routine; it will all make sense then (it won’t). The mystery is almost rivaled by that other mystery of why some of us fail to be mystified.
Orchestrated objective reduction or just an emerging proeprty of:
Our 86 billion neurons, every single one deafeningly
complex molecular machine with hundred million of hundreds of different receptor types, monoaminoxidae, (reuptake)transporters, connections to other neurons.
