When you compare it to what biology had accomplished, by at least a hundred million years ago, the tech isn't that impressive.

The problem goes to our core beliefs. We have this monolithic, monotheistic, monocultural paradigm in a binary, multicultural reality, in which a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. The light shining through the film, than the narrative projected on it.

Ideals are not absolutes and a culture founded in the assumption is obsessively, psychologically brittle.

Even the math. The map is not the territory. Our models are emergent from our experiences, not whispered by the gods.

Consider democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The family as godhead. The Romans adopted a monotheistic sect as state religion as the Empire coalesced out of the debris of the Republic. The Big Guy rules.

As these mobile organisms, this sentient interface between the body and its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the present moving past to future, but the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Time is an effect, like temperature, pressure, color and sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

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.

Energy is conserved, because it manifests this presence, creating time, as the patterns generated coalesce and dissolve. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. So the energy goes past to future, while the information goes future to past.

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 anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgement.

Life is like a sentence. The end is just punctuation. What matters, is how well you tie the rest of the story together.