One cultural issue that creates some confusion is our modeling of time.
As these mobile organisms, our experience is as a sequence of perceptions, logically originating in the need to navigate, so our concept of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future. Even physics codifies it as measures of duration.
Though the evident reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events rise and fall.
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.
So time is an effect, similar to temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
E.O. Wilson described the insect brain as a thermostat, though it has since been shown that ants can count, as a function of navigating.
In a sense then, our left brain, logical function is like a clock/ruler, as it relates sequence and relation of events. While the right, emotional side is like a thermostat/barometer, as it senses the pressure and temperature changes.
The logical side sees frequency and amplitude, while the emotional side feels the wave building and receding.
Energy is "conserved," because it is the present, it creates time. As such, it goes past to future, as the patterns generated go future to past.
With a wave, the energy drives it, while the fluctuations rise and fall.
Our state of consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form 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 the information. Signals from the noise.
This creates an intellectual tendency to define reality in terms of order and chaos, known and unknown, rather than energy and form.
Which plays out in the social realm, as organic energies drive it, while civil and cultural structures give it form and organization. Though we don't quite recognize this inherent tension between desire and judgement, given particular monolithic cultural assumptions, so there tends to be this political divide, liberal and conservative, young and old, energy and order, with no consciously evolved ability to understand the dynamic.
We evolved in this thermodynamic environment and its time to move beyond narrative as the basis of understanding. We've reached the edge of the global petri dish and are not going to colonize space, so it's time accept nature is cyclical and feedback generated.
