I think a useful window into consciousness is examining time.

We are mobile organisms, so this sentient interface between our body and its environment operates as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate. Consequently our concept of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future. Physics codifies it 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 rise and fall.

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 is 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.

Now consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it's 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.

Think about that. Not only can perceiving and perception be distinguished, by going opposite directions of time, but that consciousness acts like an energy, which is causal, while the forms it manifests are effect. Yet our intellectual process is about describing, defining everything in terms of the forms giving it shape, than the source of the dynamic manifesting the shapes. Think how much theoretical physics ties itself up in knots, trying to extract explanation from description. Heck, epicycles were brilliant math, as a description of our view of the cosmos, but the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation. They are still trying the same formula.

Plato was right. It really is just shadows on the wall.

More the light shining through the film, than the images on it.