I think the current elephant in the room, to getting some grasp of consciousness, is our concept of time.

As mobile organisms, our sentience functions as an interface between the body and its environment, that manifests as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate. So our experience of time is as the point of the present moving past to future. Physics codifies is as measures of duration.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Duration is the present, as the events rise and fall.

So 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.

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.

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, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information, signals from the noise.

Consequently we tend to focus on a reductionist concentration of patterns and miss the processes generating them. Not only don't we think in terms of the energy, but edit out the vast majority of information, aka, noise. So our main distinction seems to be between order and chaos, rather than energy and form. Even though galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.

Energy tends toward the analog side, while information tends toward the digital side.