If you want to start figuring it out, start with the point of contact between the mind and its world.
For instance, we are mobile organisms, logically necessitating this sequential process of perception, by which we experience our reality, as a function of navigating it.
One primary effect of this is that we experience time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Physics codifies it as measures of duration.
The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events coalesce and dissolve.
It's a bit like seeing the skies spinning east to west, but the actual cause is the planet turning west to east.
Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.
That human culture is about getting everyone to use the same languages, follow the same rules, use the same measures, it might seem there should be some universal, Newtonian flow of time, but it's rabbit time, turtle time, etc.
There is no literal dimension of time, beyond our memories, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it, aka, 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 the 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. 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. Though it's the digestive respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information.
So there is an intellectual tendency to focus on the patterns, rather than what's generating them, which essentially makes them shadows on the wall.
We like to scientifically assume consciousness is generated by individual brains, but it functions as an interface between the body and its world. So in essence, in the same space as other minds.
Given we all have these devices in our pockets that can transmit information through radio waves, one would wonder why, with billions of years of evolution, biology didn't make use of this ability.
Or does it and it's just that our scientific focus on seemingly stable patterns and constructs limits our perception of some of the more ephemeral aspects of our existence. So consciousness would be in our minds like the internet is in our phones. The tendency toward crowd behaviors suggests evidence of this. The hive mind as synchronized brain waves.
The larger point being that we barely understand our own circumstances and assuming anything beyond that is wishful thinking.
In fact, I would argue that Big Bang cosmology is based on extremely flawed premises and the James Webb Space Telescope will discover ever further and older sources in the background radiation, than can be shoehorned into this model. If so, this will create an earthquake in the scientific community, that can hopefully be used to re-examine some of our other cultural constructs.
