Here is my particular insight into consciousness;

As mobile organisms our experience of our situation operates as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our concept of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future. Codified as measures of duration.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events come and go.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is "conserved," because it manifests the present, creating time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

So energy, as present, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall. (No tiny strings necessary.)

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy and feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information, signals from the noise.

So consciousness not only acts like a form of energy, but presents the same problem of description as energy, in that it can only be defined by the forms it expresses.

This possibly could be taken down to the quantum level, but the issue of the nature of time poses problems for the quantum. Given the actual energy tends to lean more toward the analog, while the information tends toward the digital. Hence the very real problems Quantum theory has, of trying to pin down some state or essence that just keeps one step out of reach.

Though don't try arguing this with any theorists, or they say, where's the math?

The problem is they don't seem to understand that math is more map, than territory. Description, rather than explanation. Epicycles were brilliant math, as a description of our view of the cosmos, but the crystalline sphere were lousy physics, as explanation.

'Shut up and calculate' has just added more epicycles.