Yet if we add things, we get something larger. For instance, adding the ingredients of a cake makes one cake. Adding two sets of one equals one set of two. How does quantity work, if there are no connections?

The operation is a verb. It has to flow.

Consider time; As these mobile organisms, our experience as a sequence of perceptions is necessary to navigate, so we think of time 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.

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

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.

Energy is "conserved," because it is the present, not some dimensionless point between past and future.

It creates time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

Ideal gas laws correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but they are not considered dimensions of space, because they are only foundational to emotions and bodily functions, not the sequence of perception.

So energy, as process and present, 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 form and structure go future to past.

Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, while the central nervous system sorts and orders the information. Signals from the noise.

So there is a strong intellectual bias toward analyzing the patterns and overlooking the processes generating them.

Epicycles were brilliant math, as description, but the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation.

Map versus territory.

It might be information all the way down, but it's energy all the way up.

Waves either synchronize, which is centripetal, or harmonize, which is centrifugal. Nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems, particles and fields.