Part of the problem might be how we try to filter understanding of consciousness through our conceptual models.
Consider that as these 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 as the present moving past to future. Providing the narrative basis of civilization and which physics codifies as measures of duration.
The reality is that activity and the resulting change turn future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events coalesce and dissolve, rise and fall.
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 us into a larger social organism, using the same languages, rules, measures, etc, it might seem like there should be one universal flow of time, but that's like assuming there should be only one universal frequency.
The reason nature is so diverse and yet integrated, is because everything doesn't march to the beat of the same drummer. Multicultural, not monocultural. Rabbits and turtles. The spectrum of frequencies.
Energy is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't assume them to be projections of space, even though they are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, as sequence is to thought.
So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it is the digestive system processing the energy, the nervous system sorting the forms and information, while the circulation system is the feedback between the two.
Because we have been so successful, up to this point, by our ability to organize information, the belief has become that it is primary, rather than emergent from the dynamic. So we have come to see our static mapping as more fundamental than the dynamic territory from which it is abstracted. That the math is the basis of reality, not just a modeling of it.
If you are willing to follow this, you will realize we are just scratching the surface.
As Emerson said, we are but thickened light. We are bathed in light as well and we carry these little devices in our pockets that can transmit large amounts of information in very small amounts of energy. What if we began cognitively sensing what is going on, in these spectrums and not just focus all our tactile, monkey brain attention on the piles shiny objects, to show our status?
Galaxies are energy radiating out, toward infinity, as structure coalesces in, toward equilibrium.
Three dimensions are a mapping device, like longitude, latitude and altitude. Space is that spectrum, between equilibrium and infinity. Black holes and black body radiation.
We fluctuate somewhere in the middle.
