I think the issue of time is seriously overlooked with the issue of consciousness.

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.

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.

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.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past.

As you say, the mind is memory and without the structure of memory, there is no way to delineate a state of consciousness.

So then consider how we form memories, the signals we extract from the seas of information/noise in which we exist.

They are what resonates and bonds with our prior sense of being and self. Building layers upon our prior sense of being, like rings added to a tree, or an oyster adding and polishing layers of a pearl around the original grain of sand.

Which would seem to be a centripetal process, stuctured around the core. Even materialism is a logical conclusion of this reductionist feedback loop. Of assuming under all the fuzziness of the dynamic, there must be some integral "thing."

Yet it seems that if we step back, it isn't just the "thing," the node, as it is the relationship of the node(s) within the network. The organisms in the ecosystem.

One is a function of the synchronization, everything on the same wavelength, creating the singular focus.

While the oneness, the "entangled particles," are the networking, the energy being radiated and traded around.

Galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coelaces in.

So then we seem most "conscious" when we are focused on the details that engross our minds, that create those memories, bonding into the larger whole of ourself.

Though when that focus is lost, where does the energy, the consciousness go?

Does it, like light, simply radiate out and only gain definition by being absorbed again, to be part of some other being, like strands of DNA intermixing.

Those odd thoughts that our mind seem to pick up, especially around other people.

Like the brain is a radio and the mind is the station it is playing.

How about multiple personalities, as different loci in the same physical brain?