The more you did into this the more plausible the second seems. Indeed, the binding problem alone is more perplexing thsn all of the issues with monoconsciousness.
As someone who went all the way down the lsd rabbit hole, what's your take on this question: when your ego gets completely dissolved and you're effectively not there, who is observing and remembering the dissolution?
No, sry i'm a third secret thing and i'm not telling <3 sry for bringing your data collection empire down just by existing <3 (jk im really jaw floored by it and i love it)
I once broke myself by thinking about this too hard and fell into the dichotomy of "you're either a collection of thoughts or an observer of those thoughts". once I understood the distinction between a substance and its properties I was able to go back to a commonsense view