Roger,
Being somewhat self educated and generally non-academic, my view of time is it is an effect of action, ie. change. The problem is that as individual points of reference, we experience this change as a sequence of events and so construe it as the point of the present moving from past events to future ones. Physics then distills this to measures of duration to use in calculations.
The obvious larger reality is that these events are being created and dissolved by this process of change and so it is not the present which moves from past to future, but the events which move from future to past, due to the activity of what exists. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns, not the earth traveling some flow, or existing along some metric, from yesterday to tomorrow. So the past is determined because it has happened and the future is not because it hasn't. Yes, the occurrence of an event will determine its seemingly singular outcome, but the input into that event only occurs with its occurrence. There is no way to fully know the total input into any event prior to its occurrence because that input only travels as fast as it is conveyed.
Now human history and thus civilization is based on this narrative vector and I find the more educated a person is, the less willing they are to look beyond narrative structure, but sequence is not causal, energy exchange is. One day doesn't cause the next, or one wave cause the next. Light shining on a spinning planet and wind across the water cause days and waves. Since nothing is traveling faster than light, the future is only probabilities of encounters. Meanwhile the past really has been determined by those actions and we don't need multiworlds to explain the outcome that fades ever further into the past. In fact, you might say the present is woven from strands pulled from what had previously been woven, since energy is conserved, but information really is not. So eventually the past becomes as unknowable as the future currently is.
This makes time an effect of action, similar to temperature. Time is to temperature what frequency is to amplitude. We think of temperature as a cumulative effect, yet the underlaying cause is all those specific actions of particular velocity or amplitude. With time, we experience and measure all those particular changes, ie, frequency and wonder what the universal rate of change is, but like temperature, it is only a cumulative effect of lots of actions. Each clock runs at its own rate because it is an individual action, determined by circumstance.
We are just single human molecules, bouncing from one encounter to the next...
If time really were a vector from past to future, you would think the faster clock would move into the future quicker, yet the opposite is true. It burns/ages/processes faster and so recedes into the past quicker. The tortoise is still plodding along, long after the hare is dead. Consider that, the next time you are rushing about.
Now I find most physicists don't particularly care for this observation, but you seem to wish to retain some good old fashioned sanity, so I offer it up.
Remember we still see the sun as moving across the sky and spend millennia trying to explain why, before realizing it was the earth moving the other direction.
Regards,
John M
