The problem with academia and the degree to which it seeks to influence society, is that if the premises are skewed, all the 'shut up and calculate' is just 'garbage in, garbage out.'

Our problem with understanding time is that 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 present moving past to future.

Yet the evident reality, for those of us encountering life firsthand and not through the lens of accumulated wisdom, is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

It's like trying to explain the cosmos swirling east to west, before noting that the earth, our frame of reference, turns west to east.

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

Energy, as presence, 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.

So while we try various ways to impose this temporal, linear framework onto reality, it functions thermodynamically.

Consider that with galaxies, the energy radiates out, while the structure coalesces in, with all the feedback loops in the middle, aka, thermodynamics.

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 energy. Though it is the digestive system processing the energy and feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise.

Thus the intellectual bias toward information processing as primary, not just a survival mechanism, like running, or generating toxins.

The signals our minds to pick out of the noise are what resonates and synchronizes with our prior knowledge, building on it, like rings of a tree.

Yet this goes back to earliest childhood experiences and memories, when we were most emotional and least informed. Much as religions are like the childhood memories of cultures.

So the past is constantly being altered to fit the needs of the present moment, while the future has not been fully computed, as the act of determination can only occur as the present.

So we keep building up these conceptual structures, until they break down under the weight of incoherence, then start building again, from the broken pieces of the prior beliefs.

Consciousness will always be pushing out, both building up forms, then pushing through the cracks that develop in them. This love/hate relationship with definition.

The flaw in our logic is to assume there must be some ultimate form, frame, map, model. Yet they are all finite slices of an infinite reality. Put too much information from the territory onto the map and any signal is lost back into the noise. Whiteout. Tower of Babel.

The trick is to have multiple such tools in the mental toolbox and know which is most appropriate for which situation. Not just assume one big hammer and everything is a nail.

Generals lead armies, specialist is one rank above private.