Then again if some tiny speck of assumption is flawed, then all the "shut up and calculate" in the world becomes "garbage in, garbage out."

One obvious flaw in our presentation of reality is the issue of time.

As these 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. It is the basis of culture and civilization, as narrative and science codifies it as measures of duration. "What a clock measures."

The evident reality, for those of us encountering nature on its own terms and not just filtered through the thoughts and opinions of generations of others, 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 come and go.

There is no 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.

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

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

So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated coalesce and dissolve, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall.

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, though it is the gut processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the information, with the circulation system as feedback in the middle.

As galaxies are energy radiating out, while the structure coalesces in, it poses the question of what is form/information?

As knowledge, it is the signals we extract from the cacophony of information, aka, noise. Thus it has to bond and therefore condense with our prior knowledge. So it would seem that knowledge functions as a centripetal dynamic, similar to gravity.

Basically synchronization. The little waves coalescing into a bigger wave, otherwise it's just ambient noise.

Which also explains the social, tribal dynamics. Those on the same wavelength gather into a larger group, with a central focus, while those not on this frequency are radiated back out.

The problem is when those in that group loose sight of the larger reality, in which they and their groups are nodes in the larger network. Which is a consequence of the dynamic, as those most focused obviously gain the most power in the group.

What supposedly sets people apart is the ability to see beyond the immediate.

It has been argued that people lack "free will" because our immediate motor functions are not directly connected to our sensory perceptions. That we will react before our logical thought processes come into focus.

Yet if that were a valid point, than flies have more free will than humans.

The function of all that cognitive hardware and the software we stuff it with, is to learn from our experience, in order that our future reactions are better informed.

It is when we get caught in the ruts and don't fully think through, or even reject cognitively considering the situation, that we revert back to being lower orders. Monkeys pounding our chests and throwing rocks.