I think there is one basic misconception being overlooked.

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 of time is as the present moving past to future.

Which is the basis of culture and civilization, as narrative and history. Physics codifies it as measures of duration.

The evident reality, for those of us living life first hand, 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.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.

That culture is about synchronizing society, using the same languages, rules, measures, it might seem there should be some universal flow, but it's rabbit time and turtle time and the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died.

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

So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated 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 that consciousness manifests as an energy.

Keeping mind that science has the same problem with energy, as with consciousness. That it can only be defined in terms of how it is expressed. Thus the idea of reality as information, overlooking all the electricity driving these computational devices.

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

Making the mind more referee than source of all the sentience bubbling up, as desire. Biological, emotional, intellectual.

Which might help to explain why this sentience is so obsessively active, with a love/hate relation with the forms and structure giving it definition, but also limiting it.

As galaxies are energy radiating out, while structure coalesces in, this observation can be extended in a lot of ways, but it doesn't seem to connect with many of the more academic minds, given the degrees to which they are invested in other models.

Model making is another issue worth considering...

https://johnbrodixmerrymanjr.medium.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-western-mind-906dc73cffe2