• Qualia. What is this subjective experience that I know as consciousness? I've gone through Wiki, SEP and a fair number of books on philosophy and a few on neuroscience but I still don't understand what it is that I experience as the color "red" when in reality it's just a bunch of electric fields (photons). Why can't I get the same experience — i.e., color — when I look at UV or IR photons? These too are the very same electric fields as the red, blue, green I see all the time.
• Photographic composition. I'm a designer. I know them. I use them. But only empirically. I just do not understand them at a neuroscientific level. Why does rule-of-thirds feel pleasing? Is the golden ration bullshit? My gut says yes but I'm unable to come up with a watertight rebuttal. Why do anamorphic ultra-widescreen shoots feel so dramatic/cinematic? Yet to see an online exposition on the fundamental reasons underlying the experience. Any questions to artists are deflected with the standard "It's art, not science" reply.
• Wave-Particle duality. "It's a probability wave that determines when a particle will pop into existence out of nothingness." okay, where exactly does this particle come from? If enough energy accumulates in a region of empty space, a particle pops into existence? What is this "energy"? What is it made of? What even is an electron, really? I've followed quite a few rabbit holes and come out none the wiser for it.
• Convolution. It's disappointing how little I understand it given how wide its applications are. Convolution of two gaussians is a gaussian? Convolution in time domain is multiplication in frequency domain and vice-versa? How do these come out of the definition which is "convolution is sliding a flipped kernel over a signal"?
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.