We need to reconsider the prevalent understanding of time.

As these mobile organisms, our sentience coalesces into a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the point of the present moving past to future. Physics codifies it as measures of duration.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events rise and fall.

There is no literal 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 is the present, creating time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

As such, it goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.

Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it structure and form go future to past. Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information, signals from the noise.

Hence our tendency to classify reality in terms of order and chaos, as exemplified by Complexity Theory,

rather than energy and form.

Waves tend to either synchronize, which is centripetal, or harmonize, which is centrifugal, therefore nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems, particles and fields.

As our sentience manifests as this interface between our body and its context, we need to sustain some balance, both holding ourselves together and maintaining a dense relationship with the outside world.

So, yes, the process unfolds more as thermodynamic feedback loops, than as linear progression, but nothing is ordained, since the act of determination only occurs as the present.