The subjective feeling that consciousness is singular—that there is only one 'me'—may be an illusion created by the need to respond coherently to the environment. A review of neuropsychological conditions such as anosognosia, neglect, and split-brain, alongside psychiatric disorders and psychoactive drugs, suggests that perceptual, language, memory, attentional, and motor processes can operate largely in parallel without integration. The sense of unity, or 'Me-ness', arises only when an organism must produce a coherent response constrained by environmental affordances.
The paper argues that the approach of setting aside the hard problem of consciousness—the question of why and how physical processes give rise to subjective experience—to focus only on measuring neural and functional correlates is not feasible. While some researchers advocate 'shut up and measure' as a pragmatic strategy, the authors contend that any data collection about consciousness necessarily involves an implicit or explicit stance on the hard problem itself. Thus, the hard problem cannot be bypassed through purely empirical methods.