There is another level to this sense of time.

As these mobile organisms we have this sequential process of perception, where we are freeze framing images out of the flow of light and then sorting and judging them, in order to navigate. As humans we have learned to describe situations and narrate our journeys. So time appears as the point of the present, skipping along, past to future.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no literal “dimension” of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform and drive it. Aka, causality and conservation of energy.

Being “conserved,” means the energy is always and only present. Logically the energy is dynamic and thus changing form. Which creates the effect of time, aka, change.

So the “present” isn’t just a point between past and future, as it all that actually exists, just with the configurations changing.

The energy, as process, goes past to future configurations, while these patterns being generated go future to past.

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

As an effect of activity, time is more like temperature, pressure, color, etc, than the one spatial dimension of distance. Think frequencies and amplitudes.

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.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. That much of civilization has been about getting everyone following the same narrative, playing by the same rules, using the same measures, it might seem there should be a universal time, but there is rabbit time, turtle time, tree time, etc.

When everyone is playing the same game, for the same goals, it becomes a race and everyone is on rabbit time, but the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died. Metabolism.

The reason time is asymmetric is because it is a measure of action and action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction.

The fact is that we have abstracted a bit too far from the reality and mistake the map for the territory. Math is description, not explanation. Map, not territory.

The reality is more the thermodynamic feedback loops, than linear cause and effect. Like the earth is only flat locally.