"It's turtles all the way down."

Of course, H2O molecules don't manifest as liquid, unless the temperature is between freezing and boiling and there is sufficient gravitational attraction to hold them together.

Which goes to the fact that actual causes are a whole non-linear network of relationships, which we try to frame in our linear, sequential, cause-effect thought process.

So the first question should probably be as to why we experience our reality in such a fashion?

I suspect that goes to being mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation, that we refer to as mind, or consciousness, functions as a sequence of perceptions, like frames of a film, in order to navigate. An executive function to decide between beneficial and detrimental. Signals from the noise.

Which is why we ask questions in the first place, to explore our world and to survive in it.

Consider that because our minds function this way, our experience of time is as the point of the present moving past to future, yet the evident reality is that activity and the resulting change is turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential to residual.

There is no dimension of time, beyond our linear mental constructions, 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 manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

So the energy goes past to future, becuase the patterns generated coalesce and dissolve, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions(right brain; thermostat/barometer/amplitude) and thoughts(left brain; clock/ruler/frequency) go future to past.

Though it is the digestive system processing the energy, the nervous system sorting the information and the circulation system as feedback loop in the middle.

Hence the tendency to think in terms of the patterns being projected and trying to connect them, rather than the processes generating them.

Galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in, so we exist in that feedback loop in the middle.

Journey not destination.

Turtles all the way down.