With a mind uncluttered by the facts nor burdened by any relevant training, education or experience let me comment on the nature of reality.
I’m pretty sure time is an illusion comprised of all the dimensions beyond the familiar three. We call time a fourth dimension but it is the only one forcing us to move through it. Regarding the familiar three, we can move in any direction at any speed we want. With time we can’t.
Time being an illusion is also an interesting topic that pops up in philosophies and theologies. And good presentation, btw, what are often called facts often turn out to be an illusion.
“We call time a fourth dimension but it is the only one forcing us to move through it. Regarding the familiar three, we can move in any direction at any speed we want. With time we can’t.”
Not the worst speculation but here’s my take: energy, having no mass, travels through the 3 spatial dimensions at the speed of light, but doesn’t experience time. This is due to the effect of length contraction, which is the same phenomenon as time dilation, just looked at from a different perspective. So a photon, if it were sentient, would not perceive that it was traveling through space at the speed of light. It would perceive that it moved instantaneously to its destination with no time passing at all. Or rather, it might perceive that it moved instantaneously because the distance between its starting and end point was zero. This much, so far, is 100% derived from relativity.
Now, relativity also tells us that matter can’t ever reach the speed of light in the three spatial dimensions. But it does NOT say that matter can’t reach the speed of light in the “time dimension”. In fact, if you calculate velocities in 4-dimensional space, then the sum of anything’s velocity in all 4 dimensions is always the speed of light. So it turns out that just like energy is moving at the speed of light through space, but not moving through time, nearly the opposite happens with matter. We move at nearly zero velocity (compared to energy) in the spatial dimensions, and at the same time, we move at very close to the speed of light in the time dimension. And just like length contraction/time dilation would distort a photon’s view of space, this velocity through time is distorting our view of time. This is why we cannot perceive any time behind us (except through memory), or any time ahead of us. All we experience is a single moment of time, since that is what the entire dimension is contracted to due to our great velocity in that direction.
“We call time a fourth dimension but it is the only one forcing us to move through it.”
It might force us to move through it, but doesn’t determine the direction. Certain particle operations, when reversed, reverse direction through time. IOW, first particle exchange moving forward through time is exactly equivalent to opposite-valence operation moving backward through time. The two can’t be distinguished. There is no more “reality” to the forward operation than the backward one.