[JulianMorrison]

You mostly don't self-experience. Mostly you experience what's going on around you, and what you're doing and physically feeling. Mostly, you don't act consciously. But when you direct attention at your own experiencing, or at your own actions in a deliberate way, a subsystem dedicated to that task wakes up and provides you with a homunculus self-model. That would be the 'I'.

[TheOtherHobbes]

And how do you get from a homunculus self-model to the subjective experience of the colour blue? (Or any other colour?)

...Which would be a subjective experience that seems to have curiously objective elements to it, because colours have been shown to correlate with specific sensations and associations across populations.

And then there's the much deeper question of the extent to which quantum phenomena need an objective observer.

If you think that question is trivial, try to design an experiment which provides objective evidence of change without ultimately relying on the subjective experience of a human experimenter.

[JulianMorrison]

They're separate, of course. People tend to over-attribute things to their consciousness. Blue is an analysis and categorization being done by the visual processing part of your brain. That part of your brain is grown by basically the same genes as everyone else's. It would be more surprising if it wasn't similar in operation.

Your subjectivity is your brain is you. But only tiny scraps of it are consciously accessible. Nearly all of it just does, it doesn't reflect on the doing. You only notice your visual processing when you force it to glitch or strain with optical illusions and the like.

[JulianMorrison]

As for the quantum stuff, it doesn't need a conscious observer at all. This is why an experimental qbit can decohere in a sealed box no human could possibly peek into. What it needs is one interaction whose result is contingent on state - that's a "measurement" or in unintentionally confusing terminology, an "observation".