The much more difficult part of "why do I have qualia" is not the qualia part, but why am "I" attached to this body's consciousness, as opposed to the billions of other candidates?
If consciousness emerges purely from information exchange in a complex system, then consciousness would be primarily driven by communication interactions between regions of the human brain and the rest of the body. This in turn means that there should be a way to merge or split consciousnesses.
For example, a bidirection man machine man interface would allow two humans to form one shared consciousness given a high bandwidth communication link. This can be tested.
I'm not suggesting this is a strong analogy, perhaps, but I don't see why putting a high bandwidth link between two brains would necessarily do anything at all.
(Actually -since human brains are very adaptable- maybe we would see something happen.
But emergence is not something magical. It happens when parts that are made to go together are actually together.
Eg. when you assemble cogs and cylinders and wheels into a car. The whole is more than the sum of the parts.
If you mix in some random parts from a cruise ship, you don't suddenly get a car that can go on water and carry 1000 passengers. You just get a bunch of parts that don't go together )
If we knew what consciousness is, we could make sweeping assertions about what is possible.
We don't know what consciousness is.
There's the interesting quarks that people with split brain hemispheres experience. https://youtu.be/wfYbgdo8e-8
And dissociative identity disorder where there arguably multiple consciousnesses inhabiting the same brain.
It is probably an evolutionary advantage that humans have a ( mostly) uniform singular consciousness.
The answer should be obvious to anyone earnestly thinking about the question: it doesn't. The "single consciousness" is just the abstraction we apply. We can, and often do, apply that same model to entire groups of people from cliques, to communities, to cultures, to nation states and just about any cross section of humanity one cares to. With a little effort we can apply the same model to internal mental processes[0].
The human mind is good at abstraction, which is fortunate because abstractions are useful. Unfortunately, it is often so preoccupied with any given abstraction that it forgets that abstractions are only useful contextually, because abstractions are not reality.
[0] As in Internal Family Systems, a model sometimes used in therapeutic contexts.
It doesn't seem to. When dreaming, it's possible to carry out conversations with other "people" in the dream which are indistinguishable from conscious beings you meet when awake. There's usually a single "self" in dreams, but the brain certainly seems to form extra consciousnesses on demand which react as though they had a sense of "self".
i.e. I often imagine conversations I'm about to have in my "mental pre planning" phase, usually when dealing with government officials - many of whom are belligerent officious jobsworths. They're obviously not "me" and their responses aren'y something I "think" about before they respond "in my mind".
Could that be a temporary virtual consciousness (like a virtual CPU)?
Or even if it’s not such a hard limit, there are still likely similar bottlenecks that prefer a single one from arising, etc.
:Solves everything complicated: