What are the fundamentals of the system? Volition, experience, and knowledge all seem to be attached to some conscious agent and are expressions of interrelation between consciousness and some system that informs and generates experience based on will.
For me the main "unit" in terms of the containerization is not an agent but perspective. Volition always maintains a perspective of some sort. "Agent" I think is a more appropriate terms when thinking about conventions. Like if you want to analyze the government function or markets, then you can think in terms of agents. I don't do that when thinking of higher level stuff. At the highest level there is perspective vs infinite potential, or subjectivity.
If I'm understanding correctly, the order of operations in each of the two modes shows a different emphasis as to the role of consciousness. Using knowledge as an input to volition to generate experience has the feel of being an author of your own narrative instead of merely a character arising from the experiences that have come before.
Precisely.
Do any of the three exist before consciousness, or exist unconnected to each other?
I wouldn't say "before". I don't want to put this stuff on a timeline. However there can be unconscious knowledge, such as for example the potential itself, unconscious experience, which is something you feel but ignore, and unconscious volition, which is your own will that you don't recognize as yours. Consciousness is whatever you're aware of currently, which is only a tiny sliver of possibility. The main thing worth investigating is mind and not consciousness. The mind is 99% dark. Consciousness is the 1% lit up area of the mind.
I'd put forth that volition is the prime organizing principle of the system, the will to form more complex relationships that persist and propagate in spite of entropy.
Entropy is mostly a feature in physicalism. The closest thing to entropy in subjective idealism is boredom or othering, but these don't have the predictable and mechanical quality they're thought to have in physicalism.
Life then is a system
Life isn't a system. It's mental activity. To say that it's a system is to conceive of it as a thing. I don't thing-ify life at the ultimate level.
Whatever the nature of the system, it has to give rise to consciousness and that trifold expression of interrelation, sort of an anthropic principle
Looks like you didn't even read the sidebar dude. Shame on you. In oneirosophy it's mind that gives rices to the experience of matter. The experience of matter comes and goes, whereas the mind is primordial and is beyond space and time. And you can only know the mind through your own perspective.
What you're talking about is physicalism, which we reject in the strongest possible terms here. Subjective idealism can accept a physicalism-like functioning, but that's at the level of appearance, not at the level of metaphysics, and unlike in physicalism, it's an optional experience. Physicalism deems itself to be mandatory by the physicalists. To an oneirosophy physicalism is metaphysically false and as an experience it's optional and often quite undesirable.