John Brodix Merryman Jr.
2 min readDec 26, 2021

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Always consider how you perceive, before trying to explain what you perceive.

Consider that as fauna, we are mobile organisms and have to move about our environment, rather than just rooting into and networking where we happen to be.

So in order to move, we have to navigate. Which explains why our biological sentience coalesces as a sequence of perceptions. Thus we experience this property called time as the point of the present moving past to future. Physics codifies it as measures of duration.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events rise and fall.

There is no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is conserved, because it is present, creating time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are only foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, not the sequencing of perception.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.

That society requires everyone to follow the same rules and use the same measures, it might seem like there should be some universal flow of time, but there is rabbit time, and turtle time. The turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died.

Time is asymmetric, because it is a measure of action and action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction. Entropy is a second order effect and not what is measured as time.

Energy, as present and process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall.

In a factory, the product goes start to finish, being in the future to being in the past. As the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. Toward the future, away from the past.

As lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past.

Though it's the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, while the central nervous system sorts and orders the information, signals from the noise.

So there is a tendency to describe reality in terms of order and chaos, rather than the feedback between energy driving and form defining.

Galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in. Cosmic convection cycles.

As the most basic form, waves tend to either synchronize, which is centripetal, or harmonize, which is centrifugal. So nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems.

As this sentient interface between body and world, we fluctuate in the middle.

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John Brodix Merryman Jr.
John Brodix Merryman Jr.

Written by John Brodix Merryman Jr.

Having an affair with life. It's complicated.

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