understanding myself through understanding Consciousness

At first I wanted to understand the world.

I studied diligently, learning all sorts of factual knowledge and theories about the workings of Nature.

But eventually this become unsatisfying. I sought out to understand myself - my emotions, my thoughts, my purpose.

I studied the mind - the brain - and neurons, hoping to make some sense out of these systems that appear unrivaled in their complexity.

One of my first questions I came to answer was understanding my sexuality. The idea of a single gene determining something so complicated seemed faulty, and eventually I was about to expand this reductionist explanation into true understanding. As the human brain is plastic, it is capable of molding itself to whatever cultural values get passed on. Sexuality, I found, was more the purview of memes rather than of genes.

My thoughts then turned to understanding consciousness. Researching single neurotransmitters or pathways seemed pretty hopeless; that level of reductionism would explain nothing substantial. Instead I looked at brainwaves - how neurons temporally organize information. This research field is still quite fresh, but I poured over what knowledge was available, and started to understand.

Brainwaves - oscillations of electrical activity - are used to bind together information. Neuroscience asserts that one part of the brain is registering the lines in this text, and another part is assigning meaning to each word, and another structures the words together so that they form coherent thoughts. Some how, these different regions are able to maintain a consensus that they are working on the same item.

I stumbled upon a great truth: what happens when information undergoes a "phase shift". When something that is 'true' in what system is transferred to another system. How information goes from "non-conscious" to "conscious".

My future writings will attempt to better explain this, so please follow for more!