There is one basic physical factor being overlooked, from our sentient point of view.

As mobile organisms, this conscious interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is the present going past to future, but the evident reality is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is no physical 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 manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound, as frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

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.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions, thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past.

Suggesting consciousness manifests as energy.

As it is the digestive system processing the energy and feeding the flame, while the nervous system sorts the patterns, signals from the noise, there tends to be a reductionist, intellectual focus on the patterns over the dynamics driving them. Such as the idea that math is foundational to reality, rather than an abstraction from it.

If we were to try including all the information from the territory onto the map, any signal would be lost back in the noise.

The signals we naturally do extract from the noise are what resonates and synchronizes with our prior knowledge, building on it, like rings of a tree.