Consider that as these mobile organisms, we experience reality as a sequence of perceptions, logically to navigate, than as humanity, we evolved narrative based cultures, so our perception of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future. Though the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

So while we assume there is this cosmic dimension of time, the reality is the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Energy is "conserved," because it is the present. It creates time, as well as temperature, pressure, color, sounds. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

Energy, as process and present, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.

With a wave, the energy drives it, passing through, while the fluctuations rise and fall.

So the process of determination only occurs as the present. What drive it is the energy, not the sequence. Yesterday doesn't cause today, the sun shining on a spinning planet creates this cycle of days and nights.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions giving it form go future to past. Suggesting that consciousness functions as an energy, always probing and pushing its limits and definitions, thus causal.

Though free will would also be an oxymoron, as a will free of cause would be equally free of effect and the premise of will is to affect. We are part, a small part, of nature's process of selection.

It is also worth considering that any information we can extract, such as particles and waves, is not the energy itself. Energy expands, as information coalesces.