Sasha,
I think the largest hurdle we face is our understanding of time.
As mobile, intentional organisms, we perceive our reality as flashes of cognition, then build civilizations out of the collective knowledge gained from narrating our journeys and the assorted lessons learned. So we think of time as this point of the present moving past to future. Physics codifies it as measures of duration, to correlate with measures of distance.
The evident reality, with a little reflection, is that change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is this present state, as events unfold.
As such, time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. 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 emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.
Different clocks can run at different rates, because they are separate actions. Think frequencies, or metabolism.
Time is asymmetric, because action is what is being measured and it is inertial. The earth turns one direction, not either. The relative order of a system, ie, entropy, is not what is measured and is irrelevant.
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.
The present is not so much a dimensionless point between past and future, as it is the configuration of this energy. It is the changing configuration which creates time. The energy is “conserved,” because there is no physical past for it to be left in, or physical future for it to arrive from.
Consequently the energy and the forms effectively go opposite directions of time.
Consider two billiard balls striking; This creates an event, which quickly recedes into the past, while the balls go onto future events.
Our thoughts and minds are of the events, receding into the past, while our brains and consciousness are the energy, churning onto the future.
This dichotomy of energy and form, process and pattern, is universal. Galaxies are a cosmic convection cycle, of energy radiating out, as form coalesces in. Our bodies are the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with a central nervous system to referee the desires and appetites, while sorting through external input, in order to navigate. Motor and steering.
As societies are the raw social energies bubbling up, while civil and cultural forms coalesce in.
Consider a factory; The products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. As with life, as individuals go birth to death, while the species moves onto future generations, shedding the old. The relation is the feedback, as the actions of the parts affect the direction of the process.
It’s all feedback loops and convection cycles, all the way down.
