What is the definition of consciousness that dialectical materialism is referring to?

This whole time I’ve been thinking that when people say something like “consciousness arises from matter but then can impact matter,” that they were referring to subjective experience, the internal world or qualia or whichever term. This made no sense to me because I don’t see how the experience of consciousness can affect matter. The more I read through this textbook on DM though, the more it seems like they might mean consciousness as in an intellectual understanding of existence and the environment, is that right? I wish they clarified what they meant by consciousness more in this book.