One insight might be the problem of time.

As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is the present moving past to future.

Given it is the basis of culture and civilization, as narrative and history, it can seem difficult to escape, but the simple reality is that activity and 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, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.

That culture is about synchronizing society as a larger group entity, based on the same languages, rules, measures, it might seem like there should be some universal standard, Newtonian flow of time, but it's rabbit time and turtle time and the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died.

Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't confuse them with space, even though they are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, as sequence is to thought.

So energy, as presence, goes past to future, because the patterns being generated come and go, 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 and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness manifests as a form of energy.

Though it is the digestive system processing the energy and feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise.

Thus this reductionist intellectual focus on the patterns, the nouns, with the processes, the verbs secondary.

Lives go birth to death, future to past, while life moves onto the next generation shedding the old, past to future. The process goes to the future, as the products go to the past.

Science tends to have a similar problem with energy, as with consciousness, in that it can only be defined in terms of the forms it manifests.

Given the degree to which math has come to be seen as foundational to reality and not just an abstraction from it, this all leads into some serious conceptual conflicts that many people are seriously invested in, so there are limits to how far the implications can be explored.

"Change happens one funeral at a time."

Current forms will have to fade into the past, before people can begin to see beyond them.

As linear, goal oriented creatures in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, we have yet to come to terms with the implications of the earth being round, not flat.