I can't say this will necessarily assuage your curiosity about consciousness, but I mostly stopped being overly curious about this once I realized that, it's likely only a manifestation of the aggregation of all of the individual sensory experiences our bodies have.
In other words, when you think about planet-scale phenomena such as how humans more or less all feel "connected" and non-hostile because civilization (in the most advanced countries) has reached a point where hostility is no longer essential for survival. That "experience", for each of us, is ours alone but it seems to be so ubiquitous that we can't take credit for that experience or insight as individuals. It leads me to believe a large part of our conscious experience of the world is shared and independent of the brain's capacity. More precisely, humans are (universally) experiencing phenomena that are independent of our brain's capacity to process and understand them.
I can't say this will necessarily assuage your curiosity about consciousness, but I mostly stopped being overly curious about this once I realized that, it's likely only a manifestation of the aggregation of all of the individual sensory experiences our bodies have.
In other words, when you think about planet-scale phenomena such as how humans more or less all feel "connected" and non-hostile because civilization (in the most advanced countries) has reached a point where hostility is no longer essential for survival. That "experience", for each of us, is ours alone but it seems to be so ubiquitous that we can't take credit for that experience or insight as individuals. It leads me to believe a large part of our conscious experience of the world is shared and independent of the brain's capacity. More precisely, humans are (universally) experiencing phenomena that are independent of our brain's capacity to process and understand them.