I think our current biggest stumbling block is our conception 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 experience if time is as the present moving past to future.

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 of energy. Cause becomes effect.

It is like a tapestry being woven of strands being pulled from what was woven.

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

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.

It is the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, the nervous system sorting the patterns, signals from the noise, while the circulation system is feedback in the middle.

So the mind is not so much the source of consciousness, as it is referee. The point of decision.

This also goes to theology. The flaw in modern monotheism is that ideals are not absolutes. Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The codes, creeds, heroes, narratives at the gravitational center of every culture are ideals.

The universal, on the other hand, is the elemental, so a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The light shining through and animating the film, than the stories paying out on it.

So as consciousness, we are that energy radiating through everything, but as soon as we try to encapsulate it, it is another form, that should it lose that energy, just becomes a hollow husk.

Yet much of our world is about chasing those forms, trying to find their secret. Like AI, that if we can make a computer process information fast enough, it will become sentient.

What defines, limits. What limits, defines.

Galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.