I think it’s the other way around. To paraphrase, ‘I am, therefore I think.’

Our minds process information, because we need form. Yet what manifests form?

As mobile organisms, we experience life as a sequence of perceptions, then further sort and order them. We then tell stories and build civilizations out of the collected knowledge, so we think of time as the point of the present moving past to future, which even physics codifies as measures of duration, but it is change turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

Duration is this physical state of the present, as the events rise and fall. Potential, actual, residual. So the notion of time as some eternal dimension is about like epicycles. It is built around our perception, not the underlaying reality.

There can be no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to drive and inform it, aka, causality and conservation of energy.

Time is asymmetric, because what is being measured, a particular, predictable action, is inertial. The earth only turns one direction. Entropy is not what is being measured and is a second order effect of change and flux

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think frequencies and metabolism. Much of human history has been about getting everyone following the same narratives, playing the same games, adhering to the same rules, chasing the same goals, using the same measures, so it might seem there should be a Newtonian universal time, which has been correlated with measures of distance, to create spacetime, yet time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. Think frequencies and amplitudes.

So there is rabbit time, turtle time, tree time, etc. When everyone is playing the same game, for the same goals, it becomes a race and everyone is on rabbit time, but the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died.

We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of perception.

So there is this property, called, “energy,” that is conserved, meaning it is always and only present. Yet being dynamic, is constantly changing form.

Which is the basis of time. So the energy is constantly going from past to future forms, while these patterns being generated rise and fall, future to past.

We think of a wave in terms of frequency and amplitude. The waviness.

Yet that is only descriptive of the dynamic, the pattern being generated by this energy that can only be defined as the patterns it manifests.

Now consider that our consciousness functions like an energy, always churning around, generating the patterns of thoughts and feelings.

So consciousness goes past to future, while the patterns of its experiences go future to past.

As do individual lives go birth to death, being in the future, to being in the past, while the process of life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old. Past to future. Waves versus the energy.

Meanwhile physicists, the high priests of our modern culture, are constantly sorting through the forms, the information, trying to figure out what animates them. The “fire within,” as Hawking described it.

Yet that energy is not static and we cannot formulate it as a thought, if it is not. It has no stable form. It only manifests them.

Is all energy “conscious/sentient?” That I leave for someone else to surmise.

Though there are psychological aspects worth exploring. Such as our desire to both find the ideal and then transcend whatever we find. Wanting our cake and eating it too.

That even if there is some singular supreme being to this particular planet and its life forms, than it is but a puppeteer, constantly frustrated by these puppets that insist on pulling back on the strings.

The anarchy of desire, versus the tyranny of judgement.