Here is another way to think about it.

As mobile organisms, this sequential process of perception, that is our conscious experience, evolves from the need to navigate. So our perception of time is as 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 literal dimension of time, because 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 and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

So the act of determination can only occur as the present.

While we can posit an omniscient omniscience, logically the essence of sentience is elemental, rather than aspirational. That from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell.

Knowledge is very much a function of subjective perspective. Too much information creates whiteout.

Consider that as the present, energy goes past to future, while the forms/information it generates goes future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall.

Consider as well that consciousness also goes future to past, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form go future to past.

Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous systems sorts the infromation. Signals from the noise. Even if excess signal reverts to noise. Whiteout.

So we tend to think in terms of order and chaos, rather than matter and energy.

Our instincts and emotions though, tend to sense temperature and pressure, rather than definition and form.

Even galaxies are energy radiating out, as form coalesces in.