Part of the problem with understanding either the mind or materialism is that we try to distill it down to one thing, when they seem more tension between opposing elements. Such as looking at the atom as a singular physical thing, rather than a node in a network.

Consider that galaxies are energy radiating out, as form coalesces in. As organisms, we have a digestive, respiratory and circulatory system processing the energy driving us on, along with the central nervous system to sort through and further distill the form/information precipitating out.

Now we tend to think of the mind as an information processor, but it is the energy, emotion and desire driving it. Thus we tend to equate emotion and impulse with the heart and gut. While the thought process of the mind mostly just referees these often competing desires. It is like the motor and steering on a car.

As mobile, intentional organisms, we experience our reality as a sequence of perceptions, which we are habitually sorting and judging, as a function of navigating our environment. Then tell stories to one another and build civilizations out of the collected knowledge. So we think of time narratively, as the point of the present, moving past to future. The reality though, is that 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 in order to inform it. Causality and conservation of energy.

So this energy is conserved, because there is no physical past for it to recede into, or future from which it arrives. It is the changing configuration of this energy which creates time.

Which means that as the energy goes past to future configurations, the patterns being generated go future to past. Think in terms of a wave, where the forms of frequency and amplitude rise and fall, defining the wave and its limits, but are not the energy creating and driving it.

Consider then that consciousness goes past to future, while the thoughts and feelings generated go future to past.

So consciousness functions as an energy, always and only present, while the events it experiences come and go, future to past, potential, to actual, to residual. Remembering this energy is processed by the gut and heart.

So the mind is that tension between consciousness and the forms of thought it generates.

Motor and steering. Heart and head. Desire and judgement.

So why then do emotions come and go, like thoughts? Think of the wave, where thoughts are fully formed, like the wave cresting. While emotions and impulses are the wave building or receding and the form is not clear, but the energy is evident.