One aspect that doesn't get much attention is our physiology as organisms. Since are mobile, we experience our reality as a sequence of perceptions, which we are constantly sorting and judging, in order to navigate. Then as humanity, we learned to communicate our experiences and knowledge gleaned from them.
Which would explain what we perceive as the flow of time. This point of the present, moving from one event to the next, past to future.
Which physics codifies as measures of duration. As Einstein said, "Time is what you measure with a clock.
The reality though, is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There can be no literal dimension of time, because the past is effectively consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
We remember the past and its effects surround us, but the very fact that evidence is now part of the present means the past does not physically exist.
As such time is an effect of activity, like temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes.
Energy is conserved, because it is the present. Its changing form creates time. Consider that what drives a wave is the energy passing through, yet what we observe are the forms, the fluctuations and undulations rising and falling, going from potential, to actual to residual, future to past.
So the energy as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.
In terms of a factory, while the product goes start to finish, the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product.
As individual lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.
As consciousness goes past to future, while the patterns, the perceptions, thoughts and emotions, come and go, future to past. Yet we have the digestive, respiratory and circualtory systems processing the energy, while the central nervous system sorts the patterns. Suggesting consciousness functions as a form of energy.
While this sequence of events seems fundamental to us, it is not necessarily causal. Yesterday didn't cause today. The sun shining on the spinning planet creates this cycle of days and nights. Yet our process of perception is more like the sequence of days, than the process generating them, as they are like frames in a film, snapshots of the energy and form, to locate us in our world.
