I think it might be useful to analyze our conception of time.

As these mobile organisms, we experience our environment as a sequence of perceptions, logically necessary for navigation. From which culture and then civilization has emerged through our narrative exchange of knowledge.

So we model time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Which physics codifies as measures of duration, because "math." Descriptive reductionism.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events come and go.

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.

So energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.

Think of a wave; The energy drives it, while the fluctuations rise and fall.

Products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.

As an effect and measure of activity and change, time is similar to temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but these are not referred to as the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.

As these organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us, while the central nervous system sorts and orders the forms precipitating out. Motor and steering. Thus the association of the heart and gut with intuiton.

So there is this mental focus on the forms/information, while the energy recedes from attention.

Thoughts are like a wave cresting, clear and complete, but quickly receding, while emotion and intuition are the temperature and pressure of the wave building, but not clear and final.

Consciousness does go past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts go future to past, so consciousness could be thought of as an energy, always seeking ways to expand or transcend the ordering of thought.

We have the same problem with consciousness, as we do with energy, in that they can only be defined in terms of the forms they express. Are quanta the energy, or the form?

Yet energy expands, while form coalesces. One going to the future, as the other recedes into the past. Galaxies are energy radiating out, toward infinity, as form coalesces in, toward equilibrium. Both entropic. As the wave expands out, the fluctuations settle back toward equilibrium.

Information all the way down, energy all the way up.

Given there is no actual dimension of time, the process actually occurring is more these thermodynamic feedback loops, between energy driving the systems, while the forms define and direct them. Downward causation being previous forms affecting the shapes of succeeding forms. Cycles of expansion and consolidation.

We like to frame causation in terms of sequence, but yesterday doesn't cause today. The sun shining on a spinning planet creates this cycle of days and nights.

So causation is not deterministic, but a process of determination, that can only occur as the present. Potential, actual, residual.