That can't be because I clearly exist and cannot differentiate between these "smaller agents", I am either so perfectly unified that I cannot tell, or this emergentism is bullshit

You would like Global Workspace Theory, basically says your consciousness is the result of components of the brain broadcasting their information to the whole.

I also like Integrated Information Theory which measures the conscious experience of a system by how integrated it is, which means that you can't reduce the system to the sum of it's parts without losing the emergent properties.

And the underlying animal is still there too. It's fully in control at birth, and gets drowned out as we mature (for some people, less than others).
Small children are little more than animals, which is why they're so unreasonable.
It's my belief that the reason the written word or things like clocks are usually unreadable in dreams, is because the animal is both illiterate and innumerate. Dreams are the animals understanding of our waking experience. It knows these patterns are important and how they relate to other things, but it has no fucking idea what any of it actually means.

No there’s no need to posit cutesy sounding things, that’s how misinformation starts :) If you have any sources or can cite stuff you’ve read which may point to it, that’s cool though

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat is a fantastic exploration of this idea, focusing on people who have lost specific parts of their brains due to tumors or strokes. The human mind is very much like a complex modern website- take Amazon for example, if everything is working, it’s the website where you buy stuff, but if certain specific systems are offline, you lose specific features, like your order history, or your cart, or your recommended products, etc… Missing one or two of of those components diminishes the site somewhat, but it’s still more or less Amazon. Your brain works the same way!

I posit this as well. I’m made up of at least 5 or 6 different versions of me with different biases and personalities. There’s a negative narcissistic version, there’s a happy go lucky version, a pragmatic version, a nihilist with a dark sense of humour, a soppy emotional one, and others and they all fight constantly to have their say. I thought everyone was like this 🤪

So if I run enough different AI LLM models and let them communicate, I can create consciousness?

Yeah, and come to think of it, I bet you that each one has its own characteristics. Perhaps they may be full blown individuals themeselves from another time and place, and I too will one day join them...

Brb gonna go sailing...