Paul,

The issue of time has to be addressed, to relate consciousness with thoughts, actions, etc.

As mobile, intentional beings, we experience reality as flashes of perception and then narrate our journeys to one another, so this sequential flow, from past to future, is integral to our understanding. Even physics codifies it as measures of duration.

The reality though, is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

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

Time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc.

So the process churns along, past to future, while the patterns generated rise and fall, future to past.

Thus the difference between consciousness and thought is they go opposite directions of time! As consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts go future to past.

Just as lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old. Or products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.

Now it is safe to say you would be banned from any discussion of higher theoretical physics for making this point, as everything is math, but than epicycles were brilliant math, but lousy physics.

And, yes, “energy” is also hard to define, other than it is “conserved,” thus always and only “present,” because any definition becomes pattern and that is required for “verification,” as our minds only focus on patterns, or it would be a whiteout of energy.

Basically the left, cause and effect logical hemisphere of the brain is a clock/ruler and likes clear form, so it only sees frequencies and amplitudes. It is the emotional, intuitive side of the brain that is the barometer/thermostat and can feel the waves starting to build. Which only become clear as they crest and the frequencies/amplitudes emerge. At which point the energy receding and it is fading into the past. So we only fully see the patterns as they pass.

So that is why verification, as the clarity Dennett insists on, “feels” incomplete.