We do seem to have this informational Tower of Babel, where all the various fields have their own languages, procedures, habits, etc. So what is the big picture?
I think there is a basic dynamic, between energy and the information derived from it, that does connect some of the dots.
As mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future. It's on this foundation that much of human culture and knowledge is based. Even physics codifies it as measures of duration.
The evident reality though, is that action and the resulting change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events coalesce and dissolve.
It's like trying to explain the sun and stars going east to west, without understanding the earth turning west to east.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.
That culture is about synchronizing the social organism, based on the same languages, rules, measures, it might seem like there should be one universal Newtonian flow of time and a bit of a shock for Einstein to propose otherwise, but the fact is that nature is so diverse and yet so integrated is because everything doesn't march to the beat of the same drummer. It's multicultural, not monocultural.
It would be like assuming there is only one universal frequency and not the spectrum of frequencies.
Energy is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Rates and degrees. Frequencies and amplitudes.
Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't confuse them with space, even though they are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, as sequence is to thought.
So the energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated rise and fall, future to past. Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary. Physics is still obsessed with the reductionism of atomism.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it is the digestive system processing the energy, while the nervous system sorts the information and the circulation system is the feedback between the two.
The gut decides, the head advises.
In the left/right brain dichotomy, the right brain is more the thermostat and barometer, feeling the waves of energy building and receding, while the left brain is more the clock and ruler, measuring the forms generated, though quickly receding.
There are many aspects to this relationship, from the political, with the dichotomy of liberal and conservative as social energies expanding out, as civil and cultural forms coalescing in, to the galactic, with energy expanding out, as structure gravitates in, but I find most people are either unable or unwilling to think outside the boxes they have come to inhabit.
The forms synchronize, the energy harmonizes.
Organisms and ecosystems, nodes and networks, particles and fields.
