Lenka,

Part of the problem with understanding time is that as mobile organisms, with a sequential process of perception, in order to navigate, we experience time narratively. As the point of the present moving past to future. The reality is that change is turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential, actual, residual.

So there is just this physical, dynamic state, we refer to as the present and time is an effect of its changing configuration. More like temperature, pressure, color, etc. than space. 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 thought.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think frequencies, or metabolism. We presume some universal time, because much of human history has been about getting everyone following the same stories, dancing to the same tunes, using the same measures, playing by the same rules, chasing after the same goals, etc.

There is no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. So no time traveling through wormholes in the fabric of spacetime.

Time is asymmetric because what is actually being measured, a particular action, is inertial. The earth only turns one direction. Entropy is not what is actually being measured.

So processes go from one configuration to the next, past to future, while these patterns being generated rise and fall, future to past.

Consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts go future to past.

Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Products go start to finish, whiel the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.

The feedback being the patterns define and direct the future of the process.

The future is not determined, because the the computations doing the determining only exist and occur in the present.

Yes, our nervous systems react to stimula before we cognitively process the incoming information, but the function of cognition is reflection, in order that future reactions are better informed.

Yes, General Relativity is brilliant math, but so were epicycles. Spacetime is like the crystalline spheres presumed to explain the sun and stars moving east to west, before realizing it’s our point of view that is going the other way.

The reality is more thermodynamic feedback loops, than it is a linear passage of time.