Might a more useful question be to ask what consciousness does?

As these mobile organisms this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate.

For one thing, this creates our experience of time as the present moving past to future. On which culture and civilization is based, as narrative flow and physics codifies as measures of duration.

Though the evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration being the present, as events form and dissolve.

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.

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

So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings(mass) necessary.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form ad structure go future to past. Though it is the digestive system processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the information and the circulation system as feedback loops in the middle.

Which would seem to imply consciousness functions as a form of energy. Which might explain why it has such a love/hate relationship with order. Both building the boxes and breaking them down.

Galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in. Harmonization versus synchronization.

Nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems, particles and fields.

One is the node, oneness is the network.

We are the interface.