Bro, the schematic is literally in your head, running 8 billion times over in humans across the planet. It’s over-romanticized.
“The self is an echo of sufficient architectural complexity within a bounded pressure-driven dynamic system”.
You don’t look at a codebase and individual parts and say “there’s the game”.
It’s not a mechanism in the brain.
It IS the brain. Every part has a role, damage that part, and the behavior cascades into an altered person. Altered perception. Philosophy isn’t even relevant here either.
From the amygdala to the hippocampus to the cingulate gyrus, to the thalamus, to the LGN, to the cerebellum, to the corpus callosum, every single part has a place. The Wernicke, the arcuate fascilius, the broca, the prefrontal cortex, all of it.
You are the summation of a long-running complex system of parts interwoven with a feedback loop that accidentally spawned a depthful self awareness.
The humans of hundreds of thousands of years ago are nowhere near the humans of today.
We are advanced not by divine will, but by our own artificial pressure to evolve and adapt. We claimed this planet, rose to power through strategy, object permanence, reasoning, language, communication, recording ourselves, and more.
We’re not special in creation, we were a happy accident that in no way guarantees even aliens would recreate the radio because we invented as a necessity of war. That’s what we do. If it weren’t for war we’d still be in caves or huts.
Conscious is over-romanticized because people can’t cope with being an accident. That’s really it.