I see time as an effect, like temperature, pressure, color. At what level are they “real?” So I’m talking from our human perspective, but arguing that the current mathematical, dimensional model is based on our narrative flow, from past to future. By treating time as measures of duration and equating them with measures of distance. Like epicycles were a brilliant mathematical modeling of what we actually see.

The block time version sees the events as more real than the present, because that is what is observed and measured, yet it’s the physical present in which these events form and dissolve.

I’m pointing out a presentist view, but adding that it isn’t generally clarified how this past to future flow is manifest. That as mobile organisms, we experience a sequence of events as emergent from our need to navigate, but the underlaying reality is simply change. So while we perceive the flow from past to future, it is change, turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. We are always and only present, so it’s the future coming towards us, potential, to actual, rather than the present moving toward the future.

When we view the sequence as fundamental, rather than the process creating the sequence, it seems deterministic, but it’s the process that determines.

Think of the childhood insight/description of relativity; Are we moving down the road, or is the road passing under us. It’s like the geocentric cosmology. What is our point of view? Our point of view is still the initial frame we have to work with and trying to develop a more objective point of view can be quite difficult, especially when there are significant cultural traditions and models built up around the original points of view.