alt Hacker NewsI've always thought that the mechanisms there create the experience or the illusion of a continuous self or something in that direction. When you've experienced it breaking down (automatic actions happening before you remember deciding to do them is a big contributor to the floaty dream like effect) you start to think maybe there's several systems and the observation and memory parts are just making sense of them. We assemble a self by keeping those memories and experience in a very particular way.
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There is a very good explanation here - not what brains do, but what brains MUST do. Can we walk left and right at the same time? Can we drink coffee before brewing it? No. There is a bottleneck, a serial action bottleneck on the body. So the parallel brain activity must serialize on the output channel. It has to, or face ruin. If action is serialized in time by physical necessity, then information processing must also unify before action in order to support it. We must act as one -> we must cognize as one -> or perish. There is no way to allow each limb to do its own thing, or the brain not to decide what comes next in a unified way.
Anil Seth calls the "hard problem" at best a distraction, or hand-waving to avoid answering what he calls the real problem: linking what we experience to the physical brain mechanisms.
In his theory, consciousness is a "controlled hallucination" about what is outside of us. Our senses serve to reinforce or correct the predictions our brains are making. (we have a serious latency issue)
You'll find he's saying a lot of the same things you just wrote.