Than again there are perceptual biases to how we perceive reality.

For instance, epicycles were a mathematically brilliant representation of the cosmos, from our point of view, yet lousy physics, because the underlaying assumptions were wrong.

Consider that in our highly technical, scientific aspirations towards dominating reality, we distilled, quantified, defined, monetized everything down to the nth degree, but still seem fairly clueless as to how it all fits together in the first place. We’ve lost the context in which all these pieces fit. We extracted the signal from the noise, but forget the noise is the context of the signal. Economically we extract the signal of money from the noise of society and the economy and wonder why the system is imploding, as the medium which enables it is drained off by a metastatic value circulation system.

As mobile, intentional organisms, we experience reality as flashes of perception and build civilizations out of the collected knowledge, so the narrative flow is foundational to our reality. Even physics codifies it as measures of duration, to correlate with measures of distance, constructing this geometric entity known as “spacetime.”

The reality though, is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is this physical state, as events come and go, rise and fall, like so many waves.

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

So time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. Think frequencies and amplitudes. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, 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, necessary to mobility.

Think of reality as this dichotomy of energy and form. Energy expands, as form confines and defines. Galaxies are energy radiating out, as form coalesces in. Our bodies have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through the forms, definitions and delineations coalescing out, trying to distill and order it even more. Like lighter, more elementary forms of mass become condensed into more complex, dense mass.

So our perception can only register the forms, not the energy, or it would all be a blurry, chaotic and unstable whiteout.

Yet the energy is “conserved,” thus always and only present, but constantly changing form, since it is dynamic. Thus the process goes past to future forms, as these forms come and go, future to past.

As consciousness goes past to future, while thoughts and feelings go future to past. Or lives go birth to death, while the process of living goes onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Even products go start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, cosuming material and expelling product.

The feedback being that the patterns define and direct the process, as the process animates the patterns.

Yet our minds are all wrapped up in the patterns, ignoring the process. Like the proverbial fish being ignorant of water.

So yes, it is an illusion, like a movie is light shining through a sequence of images. Yet we are as much the light, as the images.