There is the issue of time. As these mobile organisms, our experience of reality is a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so we think of time as the point of the present moving past to future, cause to effect. The reality is that change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Cause becomes effect. So the process of determination only occurs as the present, of which our conscious input acts like an energy.

Like energy, it goes past to future, while the patterns expressed, thoughts, go future to past.

Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall. So we focus on the patterns, not the process generating them.