I think you need to peel away a few more layers.
Consider that our sequential process of perception is a necessary function of being mobile organisms, in order to navigate and react to our context. This is the basis of the concept of time as the present moving past to future, but the reality is that change turns future to past.
Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. 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.
Making time an effect and measure of activity, similar to temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
So energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.
Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall.
Products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expeling product. Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.
Consciousness goes past to future, while perceptions, emotions and thoughts go future to past.
Yet it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through the patterns, forms and information precipitating out.
If you are going to model consciousness in terms of the patterns it expresses and assume the medium is immaterial, you are falling into a classic map versus territory fallacy.
A reductionst, mathematical model is description, not explanation.
Epicycles were brilliant math, as description, but the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation.
I think we will come to realize that while General Relativity is brilliant math, spacetime is lousy physics. Ideal gas laws effectively correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't refer to them as the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, becuse they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.
If you reduce the body down to its most stable components, you have the skeleton, not the seed.
