I think you are on the right track. When I perceice a particular yellow spot, for instance, the event of perceiving can be described on the physiological level as brain processes, but the content of that experience, the particular yellow spot, is on a fundamentally different conceptual level just because it is a content. Contents are not processes. Processes produce contents of consciousness, and these contents are in fact precisely what we call consciousness, at least how I understand that concept.I think that a quale is not a concept but is a simple percept.
So consciousness and matter are necessarily ontologically separate levels of being, although they may express one and the same relation we have to to the world. What is fundamental is subjectivity, which is the point in the point of view to the world, also called consciousness, that subjectivity adopts by using material organisms for its being. And when I say "using" I use that word metaphorically to describe the basic ontological structure of reality. Concepts like 'using', 'willing' and 'intending' may be expressions of the same structure but come to the picture later on.
-- Updated September 15th, 2017, 10:00 am to add the following --
The fact that contents of consciousness are on a conceptually different level than brain events has nothing to do with the question of how the brain processes information: digitally or analogically. The levels are conceptually incompatible. We cannot even meaningfully speak about the analog/digital difference in the case of consciousness.
On the ontological structure of reality: I think we can speak of teleology or final causes when we speak of cosmology, but the words 'intention', 'purpose', 'will', 'motivation' etc. should be reserved to describe individuals.
-- Updated September 16th, 2017, 8:56 am to add the following --
Perhaps I have said this before, but I say it again: The being of consciousness needs no explanation, because consciousness is the ontological precondition of all questions and explanations. The being of matter needs explaining, because its rationality is not as self-evident as the rationality of consciousness. So we need not ask "Why is there consciousness?", but we should ask "Why is there matter?" and "Why is the material universe exactly such as it is?" Empirical science cannot answer these kinds of questions, so they are left for reflective science, i.e. philosophy. Physics, for instance, can make unbelievably accurate predictions in the world of elementary particles using the equations of the Standard Model, and it has good reason to be proud of its achievements, but it has not the faintest idea about why the elementary particles are such as they are and what their basic properties mean: what is spin, what is electric charge, what is time? But it is not its business to think about these questions if there is no empirical solution to them.
This is what I mean by an alternate horizon of seeing things. It is totally different from the materialistic horizon and produces different kinds of questions and answers. However, it leaves sciences where they are, if they do not make metaphysical presuppositions, for instance the presupposition that consciousness is a property of matter, because that only leads to confusion and endless debates of non-existent problems.