Part of the problem with understanding how time functions is that as mobile organisms, we experience reality as a sequence of perceptions, then narrate these events to each other and build civilizations out of the collective knowledge, so this past to future process seems basic, but it is an effect of actions turning future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential, actual residual.

Duration is this present state, as those events come and go. Time is an effect of this activity, like temperature, pressure, color, etc.

There is no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy.

We could use ideal gas laws to correlate temperature and pressure with volume, but no one calls them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our environmental and bodily functions, rather than the sequencing of thought.

Time is asymmetric, because action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction.

Different clocks can run at different rates, because they are separate actions. Think frequencies, or metabolism.

The present is not so much a dimensionless point between past and future, as it is the configuration of this dynamic, called energy.

Yes, we perceive events in different order, from different locations, but this is not proof of events existing out on the ‘fabric of spacetime,’ but only that it is the energy conserved, not the information. It’s no more consequential than seeing the moon as it was a moment ago, simultaneous with seeing stars as they were years ago. It is the changing of the information that creates time.

The problem is that as with waves, where we can only determine/measure the frequency and amplitude after they crest, we can only measure the energy, as events, as they are past.

As organic beings, we have a digestive, respiratory and circulatory system processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system is processing the information produced. The events, the colors, the temperatures, the passing of time. We can break all this dynamic down to infinitesimal parts, but our minds only focus on the definition being produced, not the processes producing it.

The function of the mind is to sort through the myriad impulses and environmental feedback, so it is designed to make distinctions. That doesn’t make distinctions primary. They are ripples in the flow.