The flaw with hard determinism is our misconception of time.

As 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 point of the present moving past to future. It is the basis of culture and civilization, as narrative. Physics codifies it as measures of duration, to correlate with measures of distance, to formulate "spacetime."

Given academia is based on the study of what those coming before thought and adding to it, it is foundational to knowledge.

Yet the evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events coalesce and dissolve.

There is no literal "dimension" of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

It is like a tapestry being woven of strands being pulled from what was woven.

Energy is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't confuse them with space, even though they are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, as sequence is to thought.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.

That society functions by synchronizing us as a larger communal super organism, using the same languages, rules and measures, it might seem there should be one universal rate, but we don't all march to the beat of the same drummer.

Energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Suggesting consciousness manifests as an energy. Yet it is the digestive system processing the energy and feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns generated, with the circulation system as feedback in the middle.

Given it is the energy causing the patterns, thus consciousness generating thought, our efforts to reverse engineer it from the processing of information tend to run in circles.

The future is not determined, because it simply has not been fully computed.

The response would be that as all the causes are necessarily existing in this presence, it is simply a matter of occurrence, thus determined.

Yet that assumes there is some larger frame, model, omniscient omniscience in which all this is manifest, yet an objective point of view is an oxymoron.

For one thing, three dimensions are a mapping device, like longitude, latitude and altitude. The conceptual parameters of space are infinity and equilibrium. which is implicit in the frame with the fastest clock and longest ruler being closest to the equilibrium of the vacuum, the unmoving void of absolute zero. Zero and infinity.

Galaxies are energy radiating toward infinity, as structure coalesces toward equilibrium. Both entropic. Energy lost from one area is replaced by energy radiating in from surrounding areas. On the largest scales. Thus the essence of the node is synchronization, while the essence of the network is harmonization.

Any frame or map breaks down over infinity.

Knowledge, the signals we extract from the noise, are what resonates with our prior understandings and beliefs. Too much information and the focus is lost. Whiteout. The signals all fade back to noise.

The concept of this "all-knowing absolute," in the words of Pope John Paul 2, is essentially based on monotheism and the logical flaw in monotheism is that ideals are not absolutes.

Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The core codes, creeds, heroes, narratives at the center of every culture are ideals. Effectively a center of gravity. Yet they are not absolute, but the maps we use.

The universal is the elemental, not the ideal.

Science looks to the elements, art looks to the ideals.

A spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell.

More the light shining through and animating the film, than whatever story is playing out on it.

That consciousness going from one perception to the next. Building them up and breaking them down.