I think one issue being overlooked, that might peel away a few layers, is our sense of time.

As these mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the present moving past to future. It is the basis of culture and civilization, as narrative and physics codifies it as measures of duration.

The evident reality, for those of us dealing with nature on her own terms, is that activity and the resulting 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.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism. Just because society likes to synchronize its measures, doesn't mean everything marches to the beat of the same drummer.

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

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, which are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions as sequence is to thought, but we don't confuse them with space.

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 a form of energy.

It is the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the information, with the circulation system as feedback in the middle.

So while we tend to intellectually identify consciousness with the forms it expresses, they do go opposite directions of time.

Which might help to explain our love/hate relationship with order and structure, both building them up, then breaking through them, like new life shedding old skin.

Lives go birth to death, future to past, while life goes onto the next generation, shedding the old, past to future.

We need to think in terms of the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not the ideals of wisdom and judgement, from which we presume we fell. One of the residues of monotheism remains this assumption of a default objective rationality, while actual knowledge is very much a function of perspective. Too much signal and it reverts to noise.

Even what drives our information processing is curiosity, a form of desire.

Those signals we do sense are what resonates and then synchronizes with prior knowledge, then bond to those on similar wavelengths, thus this intellectual tendency to spiral into various belief systems, even past the point it should start to raise questions.

Which is to say, we really don't yet understand knowledge, the processing of information, even though we presume to build machines to do it, let alone consciousness.