What if it isn’t exactly what it appears to be to us? If the answer was that simple, thousands of years of deep thinking would have been for nothing. I believe it’s actually a difficult, perhaps even impossible question to answer.
The experience of consciousness, or that it’s like something to be you, doesn’t necessarily mean anything about how or why that’s possible or occurring in the first place.
Perhaps our defintion of consciousness doesn't match. What I think of consciousness is something that can experience. It is not even experience, feelings, emotions, these are secondary things that arise in "consciousness".
What you cannot deny is the fact there's something at all. You cannot doubt that there's something. If you doubt that, there's a contradiction. Not what is that something, but simply the fact that _there is_ something.
So the fact there's something is something that has to be true. The question "I doubt there's something in this universe" doesn't make sense.
The experience of consciousness, or that it’s like something to be you, doesn’t necessarily mean anything about how or why that’s possible or occurring in the first place.