It seems the mind is more the interface between the body and its environment, than it is the hardware working in the background.

I don't think there has been enough basic conceptualization of how we perceive.

Consider the concept of time; Given that we are mobile organisms, we need to effectively navigate our environment, so that our conscious experience consists of a sequence of perceptions, like a movie camera takes a series of stills, would be a logical necessity for navigation.

So we model time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Physics codifies it as measures of duration.

The obvious reality, if we step back a bit, is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events rise and fall.

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.

Time is asymmetric, because it is a measure of action and action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction.

Time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't call them dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of perception.

So the energy, as process and present, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.

In terms of a wave, the energy drives it, while the fluctuations rise and fall. Effectively energy and the information derived from it go opposite directions of time.

Waves tend to either synchronize, which is centripetal, or harmonize, which is centrifugal. Nodes and networks. Organisms and ecosystems.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it definition go future to past. Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous systems sorts the information. Signals from the noise.

Consequently the intellectual tendency to conceive reality in terms of order and chaos, rather than energy and form.

I could go on, on the many ways this thermodynamic relationship between energy expanding, as form coalesces manifests, from the physics of galaxies to the social dynamic of organic energies driving society, versus the civil and cultural forms giving it definition, but I find it collides with too many established areas of expertise for most people to relate.