Maybe step back and consider the underlaying dynamics, rather than being caught up in the labels?

We are mobile organisms, so our sentience coalesces as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate. The consequence is that we experience time as the point of the present, moving past to future.

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. Aka, causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is conserved, because it is the present. It creates time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

So energy, as present and dynamic process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated 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. Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information.

Waves either synchronize, which is centripetal, or harmonize, which is centrifugal. So there are nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems. Our sentient interface between body and world fluctuates in the middle.

So our consciousness functions as an energy, pushing, probing exploring every aspect, while the distinctions, forms, definitions encountered give it structure, over billions of years of evolutionary feedback loops.

We are caught between the anarchies of desire and the tyrannies of judgement.

Galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.

The truly crazy are not those arguing with themselves, but those who never argue with themselves.

This is a bit further out than you might be considering, but these are deep waters you are looking into, so trying to offer a compass to navigate that kaleidoscopic hall of mirrors, that is consciousness.