The problem with time is that as these mobile organisms, with a sequential process of perception and an narrative based culture, we experience it as the point of the present, moving past to future. Which physics does codify as measures of duration and correlates with measures of distance.

Yet we also still experience the sun as rising in the east and setting in the west.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events come and go.

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.

Energy is conserved, because it is the present. It creates time. As well as temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't refer to them as the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not the sequence of thought.

So energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.

energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall.

Lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old.

Consciousness goes past to future, while theperceptions, emotions and thoughts it manifests go future to past.

So we exist in the present like the trunk of a tree, with our roots in the past and our branches reaching for the future. A stitch between the two, balancing and connecting them.

Don't take the physicists too seriously. Epicycles were brilliant math, as description, but the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation. They still think the math is foundational, but it is simply reductionist.

If you boil a body down, you have the skeleton, not the seed.