One quite obvious distinction between consciousness and thought, is that consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts, emotions, perceptions, etc, go future to past.

Which goes to the issue of 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 going past to future.

Yet the evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. 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 and sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

So the energy goes past to future, as the presence, because it is the patterns being generated that coalesce and dissolve, future to past. Potential, actual, residual.

Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

This suggests that consciousness manifests as a form of energy. Though it is the digestive system processing the energy and feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise.

Which does prejudice the intellectual thought process to prioritize details over dynamics.

There is a similar problem with energy, as with consciousness, in that it can only be defined by the forms it manifests. So there is also a strong tendency to formulate reality as primarily information based. That it is all just digits in a cosmic computer. Overlooking just how much energy it takes to run those computers.

The fact is that information processing is simply a biological survival mechanism, like running or generating toxins. Which should be obvious, given the rapidity to which logic is discarded, should it interfere with one's tribal affiliations, sources of income, raw emotion melting the wiring, etc.

So the real problem of consciousness is not that it lacks agency, but that it is horrible at strategy.