Most people call themselves I not we, as one self observes things, but if what observes is the body, it is a collective of cells that constantly die and are replaced. For example, colon cells live only a few days, skin cells a few weeks, red blood cells a few months, and white blood cells a year or so, so where is the “I” unity in a bunch of cells that come and go? Yet some nerves may last a lifetime, so one biologist concluded that we are really just a pack of neurons:
“The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You’, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons’.” (Crick, 1995).
This astonishing hypothesis is of course inevitable for materialism, because if the body is particles of matter, there is no unity that can be a self. And if these particles cause everything, we are just a machine, as is the universe. The idea that we are a machine driven by atoms, genes, or neurons then recurs in academic fashion, but is actually as old as materialism itself.
Materialistic science must conclude that “I” is a medieval error, like that the earth is flat, so it is more correct to say We or It saw, rather than I saw. But if the matter of physics can’t experience its actions, not only is there no single observer, there is no observer experience at all. Materialism, as will be seen, then ends up denying the basic fact that we experience physical events.
The reader can decide, but if you still think you have a self that observes, welcome to the hard problem of consciousness, that a physical aggregate of cells experiences life as a self.