How about looking at consciousness, if not sentience, from an emergent perspective?
We are mobile, so we have to navigate, thus requiring some perception of our environment. Which would logically organize as a sequence, because we have to move as one entity. Rather than a plant, which doesn't need to sense linearly and can just respond in whatever direction there are signals.
So there is this process of sequential perception that comes to manifest the experience of fauna.
As these organisms evolved, this feedback between organism and environment builds up layers of mental complexity, to where the resulting mind starts creating its own internal images out of the constantly interacting layers. Yet under this, remains that sequence of perceptions, we call time.
Though the physical reality is not the point of the present, moving past to future, but change, turning future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no literal "dimension" of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
The feedback loop is like a tapestery being woven of strands pulled from what had been woven.
Energy is "conserved," because it is manifesting the present, not just a dimensionless point between past and future.
As process, the energy goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave out, as the fluctuations rise and fall.
Products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.
As consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts rise and fall, future to past. Suggesting consciousness functions as energy, though it is the gut processing the energy(feeding the flame?), while the brain sorts the patterns/information.
Though it is our desires driving us, rather than the objects of our desires.
Which gets to the subject of "free will."
For one thing, if the process of determination can only occur as the present, the future is not determined.
Determination is a process, not a pattern. We might use previously generated patterns to predict future patterns and do it with increasing effectiveness, but they still have to be generated, in order to exist and that is process.
Also that as consciousness functions as an energy, it is causal. Always pushing, probing, exploring. Even its own prior configurations and feedback between those patterns. Which is process. So the mind does seem to chase itself around. Feedback.
That consciousness isn't in direct, immediate control of the automatic motor functions doesn't mean we lack autonomy, but that consciousness has come to serve an executive function, of processing information, so that future reactions are better informed. We have lost the response time required for survival, with all that reflection. Though with practice, we can recreate that flow of immediacy.
Though the concept of "free will" is an oxymoron, as an action lacking cause would be equally lacking in effect and the premise of will is to affect.
We are a small part of nature's process of selection.
As to the source of that biological sentience, that's another question.
Though a spiritual absolute would logically be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell.
We are only simulations to the extent we are the current form and feedback of an eternal process.
Conservation of "energy."
