What is consciousness and where did it come from?

These are two questions people have been asking for millennia. I recently saw a news article where scientists believe consciousness might be part of an all-encompassing cosmic consciousness.

Is it possible the universe is one huge conscious entity — its stars, neurons radiating messages over the vastness of space?

If that is the case, What is our own consciousness? Maybe we are a tiny concentration, a spike to use a metaphor, of this thing called consciousness. Might the height of the ‘spike’ correlate to the quantity of consciousness of the entity — space being a vast void, inorganic objects possessing a minute fraction of consciousness like a sheet of sandpaper, plants possessing higher spikes and animals higher still with sentient beings having spikes of greatest magnitude.

If that is the case, why can’t we communicate with each other on a physical level? Or can we, and we have lost the ability to identify and understand what we experience? Maybe some law of nature blocks it. Do we really want to know what everyone else is thinking? Do we want them knowing what we think of them?

Is there such a thing as group consciousness, like bees in a hive? And could such a conglomeration of consciousness produce an even higher spike creating intellectual understanding far beyond what we have at present?

And what about Artificial Intelligence? Is it, or could it become, conscious? How would that affect our understanding of consciousness? Is consciousness the same as intelligence? I think not, but no one can define consciousness at present.

And the ultimate question — is the cosmic consciousness the mind of god?

As you can see, I have many questions on consciousness with no satisfactory answers. It’s hard to understand something that has no physical, scientific basis behind it other than a combination of chemical reactions producing sparks of electrical pulses. But how does a defined sequence of these produce consciousness?

Consciousness and what it is needs greater understanding before we fully grasp who we are and why we are here.