How about context?
Thought gives form to our emotions, but it does so by these desires and impulses interacting, competing and cooperating. Say one’s impulse to murder a co-worker competes with one’s desire to remain employed. Which is further enforced by the desire to remain part of the community and not be thrown in jail. We are a multitude of such inclinations, that are channeled through the thought process. It should be noted that plants do not have a central nervous system, but then they do not have to navigate their environment and consequently make continuous decisions about directions to take. Which goes to that relationship between the gut and brain. The gut provides the energy driving us on, while the head decides the direction. Basically motor and steering. Though with limited braking.
What the brain presumably works with is information, but information is only the forms manifested by the energy. Like amplitude and frequency of waves. As the energy is dynamic, it is constantly changing form and since form is only fully expressed when the energy is peaking, we most clearly see this reality as it is receding.
We project this sequence of perception as foundational and call it time, but time is not so much the point of the present, moving past to future, which even physics codifies as measures of duration, but the change that is integral to energy, turning future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is this dynamic state, as events coalesce and dissolve.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to be informed by it. Aka causality and conservation of energy. Time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. Effects which are equally important to biology.
Different clocks can run at different rates, because they are separate actions. Think frequencies, or metabolism.
Time is asymmetric, because action is inertial. The earth turns one direction, not both.
The cycles of thermodynamics are more fundamental to our reality, than the sequencing of time, whether karma, or just reciprocity. Even galaxies are cosmic convection cycles, of energy radiating out, as mass coalesces in.
Our politics are that tension of social energies pushing out, as cultural and civil forms coalesce in. Like youth and age. Cycles of of energy and form.
We are mobile organisms and naturally think we are going somewhere, so we have this ideals based culture, where if some is good, more must be better. The result is bigger waves and deeper troughs.
Thought is a cycle, of collecting information, distilling out the core element, aka reductionism. Then placing it in the larger context. Though the result is abstraction, nothing more. Its function is not so much to direct our immediate reactions, which are responding to a reality often changing at the speed of light, but to learn from those experiences, in order to better inform future responses.
