You also may just be stuck in a local maximum (of probability of being right), but have not explored the entire space of possibilities. Other people with different starting points and different paths may be stuck in their own local maxima, the only way to judge which is "right" is if all brains agree (converge) on the same answer, which may take infinite time (so is impossible for mortals). Consciousness trying to understand the universe is just like a huge markov chain monte carlo experiment.
That's the basis of spirituality, finding your own path to find the same truth. In no way is it impossible for our species to become like-minded, time is an illusory boundary. And consciousness grasps itself fine, it's the ego that's in need of lessons.
Good point, individuals are mortal, while species are not. To keep my mcmc analogy going, each species is it's own chain, each individual/brain/consciousness/ego is a unique genetic (in the computer science
and biological sense) algorithm that samples from the space of possibilities. This is how I look at it:
The challenge here was to fit a curve with 3 parameters to some data, you can see that the chains all converged quickly onto one point, but failed to explore the entire set of possibilities (avoided areas of low probability, although the best answer may have been found surrounded by unlikely answers). The more challenging task of understanding the universe, existence, etc has many more dimensions, and there are many more chains exploring this space some branching off others at certain points, and they are not all independent of each other.
Your brain probably agrees with the machine:
