A few thoughts;
Patterns are static. What’s the dynamic driving their emergence?
We are mobile organisms, which results in a sequential process of perception, then, frequently, judgement, as a function of navigation. Then, as members of humanity, we have a narrative based culture, as a consequence of telling stories of our experiences to one another, so the passage of time, as the point of the present moving past to future, is fundamental to our model of reality.
Physics even codifies it as measures of duration and correlates them with measures of distance, to come up with spacetime.
The reality though, is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential actual, residual.
There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, informing and driving it, aka, causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is conserved, because it is the present. Its changing configuration creates the effect of time, those fractal patterns, blooming and receding, like waves, rising and falling.
Time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, sound. Think frequencies and amplitudes. Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don’t refer to them as the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.
The energy drives the wave, while frequency and amplitude are information conveyed by the resulting fluctuations.
So the process, the energy, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. As consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts and feelings go future to past. Lives go birth to death, as life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old. Products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.
Even galaxies are energy radiating out, toward infinity(potential), as mass/form coalesces in, toward equilibrium(residual). Cosmic convection cycles. Feedback.
Society is that dichotomy of social energies pushing out, as civil and cultural forms coalesce in. Youth/age, liberal/conservative.
As these mobile organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through the patterns precipitating out. Which does tend to cause an intellectual bias toward pattern, over process. It from bit.
Our search for conceptual clarity obscures the dynamic driving it, as this is modeled statistically, because it is fuzzy. Order/complexity/chaos. Past/present/future.
We are like the fish that doesn’t see water, only the patterns reflected, lensed, filtered by it.
