I think a much clearer delineation of consciousness is to consider our experience of time;

As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our sense of time is the present going past to future.

It is the basis of culture and civilization, as narrative and history. Physics codifies it as measures of duration.

Yet the evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

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

Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, 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. Suggesting consciousness functions as an energy.

The digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise, with the circulation system as feedback in the middle.

Science tends to have the same problem with energy, as with consciousness, in that it can only be defined in terms of the forms expressed. As our thought process tends to be more about reductionistically sorting and organizing the forms, than holistically sensing the dynamics generating them.

Now to what extent any energy is conscious is another, much more complex issue, given it has taken billions of years of evolution to produce our particular manifestations.

Given the state of the world, our levels of intelligence are necessarily only tactical, not strategic. The focus being on the details, not the bigger picture.