One overlooked issue with both the physical and mental is how we have modeled time.

As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is the present moving past to future. As the basis of culture and civilization, as narrative and history, it is foundational to our accumulation of knowledge.

Yet the evident fact is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no physical 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, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

Energy, as present, 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 necessary.

As consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and substance go future to past, it suggests consciousness manifests as a form of energy.

The digestive system processes the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the information, signals from the noise. So there is an intellectual tendency to focus on the patterns.

It should be noted that science tends to have a similar problem with energy, as with consciousness, in that they can only be defined in terms of the forms they manifest.

It's bit like trying to explain the cosmos swirling east to west, before noting that it is the earth turning west to east.