What we refer to as consciousness is this sentient interface between our body and its situation. Which functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, because we are mobile organisms.

So our experience of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future. Physics codifies it as measures of duration and correlates them with measures of distance, to create this construct called spacetime.

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

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 our activity into one larger social organism, based on the same beliefs, rules and measures, it might seem there should be one universal, Newtonian flow of time, but it's rabbit time and turtle time and the turtle is still plodding along, long after the rabbit has died.

That nature is so diverse and so integrated, is because everything doesn't march to the beat of the same drummer. Harmonization, rather then synchronization.

Harmonization is centrifugal, while synchronization is centripetal. So nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems, particles and fields.

Time is asymmetric, because it is a measure of action and action is inertial. The earth only turns one direction.

Energy is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we don't consider them extensions of space, even though they are as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, as sequence is to thought.

So energy goes past to future, because the patterns it's generating form and dissolve, future to past. Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

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, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy and feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information, signals from the noise. The gut decides, the head advises.

So there is an intellectual tendency to focus on the patterns, rather than the processes generating them.

Galaxies are energy radiating out, toward infinity, as structure coalesces in, toward equilibrium.

The path of least resistance for energy is to expand, while the path of least resistance for form is to coalesce, because one large wave is more efficient than many small ones. So entropy is going both directions. Black holes to black body radiation. Synchronization versus harmonization.

Energy lost from one area is replaced by energy radiating back in from the surrounding infinity.

Nodes and networks.

As this interface, we fluctuate somewhere in the middle.