Time is misunderstood.
We are mobile beings and focus our sentience on our path through life, so we experience it as a sequence of perceptions. Then narrate our journeys and build civilizations out of the collective knowledge. So we take this passage of time, the point of the present moving past to future, as fundamental.
Physics even codifies it as measures of duration, to correlate with measures of distance.
Yet it only takes a little consideration to realize that change turns future to past. Potential, actual, residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is this present state, as events come and go.
There is no actual dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. Aka, causality.
Energy is “conserved,” because it is always and only present. There is no physical past for it to recede into, or future for it come from.
The present is not so much a dimensionless point between past and future, as it is the configuration of this energy. Its changing configuration creates the effect of time.
As such, time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, not our thought process, so we can afford to be more objective about them.
One of the effects of temperature and pressure are thermodynamic convection cycles. Energy radiates out, until it can no longer sustain itself and coalesces back in. Galaxies are cosmic convection cycles of energy radiating out, as mass coalesces in.
Consider how that dichotomy relates to time; Energy functions as a process, constantly changing form, thus it goes past to future, while these forms coalesce and dissolve, future to past. They are the patterns arising from this process.
Consider a factory; The product goes start to finish, while the production line points the other way, consuming material and expelling product. Then there is the feedback, as the success, or otherwise, influences the direction of the process and the next generation of products.
Life is similar, in that individuals go birth to death, while the species goes onto the next generation, shedding the old. Similarly the actions of the individuals affect the future of the species and future generations. Basically motor and steering. (Little braking.)
As organisms, we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy driving us on, along with a central nervous system to distill out useful information and referee the senses, to guide us on our way. Motor and steering.
So energy and form go opposite directions of time, but it is form we perceive, so it is constantly fading into the past, while the energy churns along into the future.
All in thermodynamic feedback loops.
The problem goes back to us being those mobile, intentional beings, as we think we are going somewhere and build whole cultures and religions around this nirvana we propose as the end state. But to nature the end is just one more wave crashing, as the energy and beingness goes onto other forms and thoughts.
Without the ups and downs, it’s just a flatline.
We are as much the network, as the node. In this atomized culture though, the network is mostly entrusted to the financial circulation mechanism, but that’s another rant.
