One usful idea for understanding the relationship between consciousness and thought is to review the concept of time.

As mobile, intentional organisms, our experience is flashes of perception, that we are constantly sorting and judging, as a function of navigating our environment. Then, as humanity, we tell stories about our journeys and build civilizations out of the collected knowledge. So we naturally experience time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Even physics codifies it as measures of duration.

The reality though, is that change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is this physical presence, as events form and dissolve.

There is no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to drive and inform it. Causality and conservation of energy.

So time is an effect of activity, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but no one calls them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thoughts. Frequencies and amplitudes.

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

Consciousness then, goes past to future, while thoughts and feelings go future to past. As lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old. Products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.

The feedback is the patterns define and direct the process, while the process drives and manifests the patterns. Thermodynamics. Energy out, form in. Think galaxies.

I could go on, but safe to say, this particular point has me banned from various physics discussions. Don’t argue with the gods of math.

Then again, epicycles were brilliant math, but lousy physics. The map is not the territory.