Sean,

Just to add a few points to an otherwise clear and insightful argument;

Part of the problem is that civilization is built out of the collective narrative, so the assumption is that time is this narrative flow, from past to future, so it seems impossible to escape the inertia, but the underlaying reality is that change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is only this dynamic state and as mobile organisms, we evolved a central nervous system to sort through the multitudes of input, in order to navigate our environment.

Much of this change and dynamic is occurring at the speed of light, so our subconscious impulses operate much faster than our cognitive organizing, but then the function of the thought process is not to respond directly, but to process the information, in order that future responses are better informed.

The future is not pre-determined, because much of the input into any situation arrives as light and the information could not have traveled faster. So there is no way to compute the effect, prior to the cause. All the computation is occurring as the present. The future remains potential because it has not been computed and the past dissolves into residue, as the input is no longer complete.

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

This physical state isn’t a point between past and future, so much as it is the configuration of the conserved energy. It is the changing of this configuration that creates the effect of time in the first place. As such, time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. Also referred to as frequency.

Thermodynamic feedback loops better explain reality, than the linear projection of time.

Reality is not so much material, or an illusion, as it is the tension and balance of opposing forces, elements, poles, etc. There are two sides to everything, or there is nothing. It is just that we have an ideals based, monastic culture, where the fact everything is connected, must mean it is singular, rather than just networked.

Alan Watts gave a particularly insightful refutation of determinism, with his observation that the wake doesn’t steer the boat, the boat creates the wake.