Maybe we need to slow down, if we want to grasp more than just the surface. The turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died.

For one thing, we view time as the point of the present, moving past ot future, but the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present. Cause becomes effect.

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

What does it do for the question of determinism, if the process of determination only occurs as the present?

Consider that a spiritual absolute would necessarily be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. That we are aware, then the details of which we are aware.

Conflating the ideal, which is aspirational, with the absolute, which is elemental, creates the assumption one's ideals should be universal and unquestioned. Thus this political impulse of absolutist monocultures.

Why haven't the philosophers asked whether it is wise to conflate the ideal with the absolute?

Good and bad are not some cosmic duel between the forces of righteousness and evil, but the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental. What is good for the fox, is bad for the chicken. The 1/0 of sentience.

Trying to make sense of complex evolved human morality and ethics, without taking this into account, is like trying to understand computer programing, with no concept of binary logic.

Yet try raising any of these points with anyone currently indoctrinated into the various schools and fields and you will find yourself "cancelled."

People don't really care for truths, they just want answers, to be part of the crowd. That's why we have so many priests and polticians, but philsophers are neutered and confined to the back alleys of academia. Thus the current popularity of stoicism, the conceptual equivelant of xanax. Opiate of the dull.