I think the reason we are so perplexed by time is that as we are these mobile organisms, this sequential process of perception originates from the need to navigate. Then as humanity, we have narrative based cultures, so our experience of time is as the point of 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 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.
Energy is "conserved," because it is the present, not some dimensionless point between past and future. It creates time, as well as temperature, pressure, color, sounds. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't refer to them as the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, not the sequencing of perception.
The energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Think in terms of a wave; The energy drives it, as it passes through the medium, while the fluctuations rise and fall.
Galaxies are energy radiating out, toward infinity, as form coalesces in, toward equilibrium. Both entropic.
Consider the implications for understanding physics, if any information effectively goes the opposite direction of time, from the energy it defines.
In everyday reality products go start to finish, future to past, as 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.
Consciousness goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions, thoughts go future to past.
Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts and orders the information. So there is this intellectual bias towards explaining reality in terms of the information.
The anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgement.
Sequence is not causal, energy transformation is. Yesterday doesn't cause today, the sun shining on a spinning planet creates this cycles of days and nights.
Time is asymmetric, because it is a measure of action and action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction.
Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.
That civilization is about getting everyone following the same stories, playing by the same rules, using the same measures, it might seem there should be some universal, Newtonian flow of time, but there is rabbit time, turtle time, tree time, etc. Though the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died.
It's like this tapestry being woven of strands being pulled from what was woven. Feedback loops.
Though trying to discuss this view of time isn't very popular, given the degree it disrupts convention, but I keep trying to put it out there, in hopes it becomes part of the discussion.
