As these mobile organisms navigating our environment, we do perceive it as a sequence of perceptions, so our concept of time is of the point of the present, moving past to future. Physics codifies this by treating it as masures of duration.

The reality though, is that change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

Duration is this physical state, as the events come and go. It’s just that the events are measurable and science likes measurement.

The present is not so much a dimensionless point between past and future, as it is the configuration of the energy. Yes, different events will be observed in different order, from different locations, but that’s no more consequential than seeing the moon as it was a moment ago, simultaneous with seeing stars as they were years ago. It’s the energy that’s “conserved” and thus always and only present. Not the information conveyed by it. Time is the effect of the changing information manifested by the energy.

There is no physical “dimension” of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform and drive it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy.

The reason time is asymmetric is because what is measured is action and action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction.

As an effect, time is more like temperature, pressure, color, etc, than space. Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but no one calls them dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.

Think frequencies and amplitudes.

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

That much of human history has been about getting everyone following the same narratives, speaking the same languages, playing by the same rules, using the same measures, it might seem there should be a universal time, but there is rabbit time, turtle time, tree time, earth time, etc.

When everyone is playing the same game, for the same goals, it becomes a race and everyone is on rabbit time, but the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died. Though every cell in our body is its own clock and it does work better when they are in harmony.

So the process, the energy, goes from past to future configurations, as these patterns rise and fall, future to past.

Consciousness goes past to future, as thoughts and feelings go future to past.

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

Try wrapping your mind around the implications of that and it is this narrative based culture that starts to look dated.

We are the only life forms to escape the present, through our story telling, yet when we were not always in such a rush to reach our goals, this physical, cyclical, feedback driven reality becomes much deeper and richer.