SelfishRandroid

SR,
There are concrete things that can only be identified by abstract thought. An example would be an electron or the magnetic field it generates if the electron is moving. An attribute such as the electron’s electric charge or it ability to produce a magnetic field are attributes. I suggest that faculties are just functional attributes.
Functional items arise only in a biological setting. The mental is only within the biological. Those are positions of Rand (me too).
As you know, in the ITOE, Rand called out a category of primary existents which she titled entities. Here other basic ontological categories called out there were actions, attributes, and relationships. In your quotation, she is saying that consciousness is an attribute, not an entity. By “certain sort of entity” she would mean certain animals. The attribute consciousness is a functional attribute, and such would seem reasonable to call faculties, continuous of a philosophic tradition of speaking of mental faculties.
Faculties are powers, I’d say. If we spoke of the faculty of walking, we would not mean anything but the ability or power to walk. I imagine it’s just traditions of talking to typically say ability to walk or faculty of thought.
It would be natural within Rand’s metaphysics, I’d say, to take primacy of existence to consciousness to be statement about a relationship. All of Rand’s fundamental categories—entity, action, attribute, and relationship—are existents. The latter three, as you know, are dependent on the first one, the primary form of existent.
Rand took the solar system to be an entity. The biological consciousness-system could be an entity, and this is natural to call mind. It can be an entity set within a larger entity, just as the solar system. But mind is a functional system set within a larger array of functions of the animal. A self is that mind.
Consciousness is sometimes not awareness of an awareness. It is just awareness of things not itself sometimes and most fundamentally. Some animals could have consciousness-selves without awareness of their consciousness-selves, I think.
The question of how one identifies what constitutes one’s mind is something I’ll have to leave. For the answer, I’d look both to modern developmental cognitive psychology and to history of philosophy on the constitution of the mind: the Greeks, Arabs/Scholastics, early Moderns, right on through philosophers to now. Big project, that one!
I think it is right to see consciousness as action, as attribute, or as to relationships. These fundamental categories do not have the exclusivity had by Aristotle’s categories. The can all be true characterizations of a thing, appropriate in different contexts of consideration. 

One thing I would like more understanding and discussion about is applying Objectivist frames of thinking to more social issues where the government is not involved in any way, distinct from the usual discussion about what the government is doing but should not do. Related to that is that I am growing more interested in actively persuading people to think about various issues differently, talking about how to establish meaningful change for individual lives (mental health is a big topic to me). I'm not sure where to find other people with a similar activist frame of mind. Other than to create something myself, of course. If I don't find anything helpful for my goals, I will create something.
Another interest is wanting a lot more about building on Oist epistemology and thinking about that, but my academic pursuits in psychology and philosophy fulfill that pretty well. The meaningful discussion I want about this involves the application of epistemology to psychological theory.
 

You are missing what is so apparent. The underlying ethics ("of emergency") is being pushed to the hilt by an alarmist media. The overwhelming 'narrative' I read and hear, from all corners and many individuals, is one of altruism-collectivism-egalitarianism. Because, for one reason given, "we" will need a "better" world "afterwards". We are all "equal" now, and must remain so. One would have to blind not to see that the Left discovered its premise, power base and raison d'etre based largely on the narrative of victims and oppressors. With "victims" running short - in a booming economy, falling unemployment and so on - they have had to find others, just to survive. And therefore played the race card, the migrant card and many other divisive victim "cards".
The success and freedom of increasing individualism and capitalism is too self-evident. Their biggest foes can't argue with that. Therefore, the ethics of emergency and (temporarily necessary) state emergency powers HAVE to be furthered beyond the crisis. These new "victims" fortuitously produced by the coronavirus have provided all the timely justification for sacrificial and self-sacrificial measures - and ethics and political power - to be embedded in much of the people's minds, well into the future. There's little good for individualists facing the rising tide, now and in the near future, and the purported defenders of capitalism, big business, have already bought into those sacrificial ethics and absconded.
You show me how 'to make good out of an otherwise bad situation" in politics and economy. And: "People should take that opportunity". Which people and why? - a majority are indeed taking the opportunity to press for change:
in the opposite direction to which you imply.
A recent corona meme: "Capitalism did this, so it must be controlled" (never completely overturned, you notice - the far left knows on which side its bread is buttered).
For the record, this virus will lose its grip, due to the best of men's and women's minds/dedication, but the virus called the sacrificial morality will not.

There is no such resource. Objectivism only touches tangentially on the issue; most issues of metaphysics are not addressed in a philosophically serious way. You will find a wide variety of answers from "Objectivists" on issues such as free will and the metaphysics of consciousness, ranging from reductionist materialism to outright dualism, and various things in between, but there is no "official" answer and nothing definitive written by Rand.
I would personally argue for a strong libertarian free will stance, arguing along the lines that the contrary is absurd, incoherent, and impossible.