We are mobile, intentional organisms, so there is no getting around that focus on the goal, whatever it might be.
Though to pick it apart a bit more, consider some of the biases being generated. For instance, as these mobile, intentional beings, we experience reality as flashes of perception, then narrate our journeys to one another and build civilizations out of the collective knowledge. So the effect of time as the point of the present, flowing past to future, is deeply ingrained into our psyche. Even physics codifies it as measures of duration.
Yet it is change that turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Potential, actual, residual. Duration is this physical state, as events coalesce and dissolve.
Different clocks run at different rates because they are separate actions. Think metabolism, or frequencies. Much of civilization is built around trying to coordinate events into some larger history.
There is no physical dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it. Aka, causality. Energy is conserved, because there is no physical past for it to go to, or physical future for it to come from.
So time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color, etc. We could use ideal gas laws to correlate temperature and pressure with volume, but no one calls them the 5th and 6th dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to our emotions, bodily functions and environment, rather than the sequence of thought.
The future is not determined, because it is the computation of the present that determines. The total input cannot be fully known, prior to an event, so neither can the output. As Alan Watts put it; “The wake doesn’t steer the boat, the boat creates the wake.”
Think of two billiard balls colliding. This creates an event. As this event fades into the past, the balls go onto the next event and the next. Our thoughts and minds are of the events, fading into the past, as our consciousness and brains are like the balls, going onto the future. Patterns going future to past, as the processes generating them go past to future.
Think of a factory; The product goes start to finish, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. Or as individual lives go birth to death, while the species goes onto the next generation, shedding the old.
It is a dichotomy of the energy and the forms it manifests. As energy is constantly generating new forms, it goes past to future, while the forms go future to past. Which results in the feedback of the forms/patterns affecting the direction of the process. Much as products affect future production, or individuals affect the species. Motor and steering, but no brakes.
Galaxies are energy radiating out, as mass coalesces in, in a cosmic convection cycle.
Our bodies have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems, processing the energy driving us on, along with the central nervous system to distill out useful information and referee the senses and emotions. The left, logical hemisphere of the brain is a clock, while the right emotional, intuitive side is a thermostat.
Societies have that raw energy bubbling up, as youth and liberals, along with the cultural and civil forms coalescing, trying to give it stability and form, as age and conservatives.
All as endless feedback loops. The circle.
Yet we have this ideals based culture, where we think this journey is going somewhere better, whether morally ideal, economically larger and more efficient, emotionally happier, etc. Meanwhile nature just feeds it all back into the pot. Time is a tapestry being woven of strands pulled out of it.
Efficiency is to do more with less, so the ideal of efficiency would be to do everything with nothing.
As social conventions settle into patterns, the energy bubbles up through the cracks and weaknesses, so the system, viewing them as cracks and weaknesses, patches them over, creating more pressure in other ways. Not every acorn gets to be an oak tree, but without the acorns, there are no oak trees.
The logical fallacy of monotheism is that a spiritual absolute would be that essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgment, from which we fell. The new born, not the wise old man. The consciousness and desire seeking knowledge and affirmation, not the objects of this desire. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.
The energy of this light going from one frame to the next, as these frames come and go.
It is just that in order to function, a society needs some rules and regulations, so this top down father figure lawgiver and his ten commandments is a useful story telling device for passing these codes of conduct onto the next generation and the next.
Although confusing the absolute with the ideal does create significant conceptual issues for society, such as presuming one’s cultural model must be an absolute, so any other is wrong. Remember democracy and republicanism formed in poly and pantheistic societies, so when we went back to those civil models, separation of church and state became necessary.
In the nodes and networks feedback, neither is paramount.
I could go on, but my mind is bogging down.
If you are interested, here is my take on economics;
Maybe, after we do come to our senses, humanity will be the central nervous system of a global organism. Though that’s certainly not imminent.
