What is time?
Time is three different things sharing one word: order, direction and flow. Order is which event depended on which. A later repair certifies that it read a value an earlier one wrote, and pairs with no such chain between them have no fact about which came first. Direction comes from the repair itself, which can average seven possible pasts of a seam into one reading and destroy the difference. Flow is what a region's own state makes its questions do, a reversible motion computed from the odds it holds, with its rate built in. A clock joins them, as an observer that counts every repair touching it and turns the count into phase. Tallies, waves, light signals and a region's own flow all read one parameter, because each is a reading of the same repair history.
Also in Chapter 21: Why Does Time Feel Like It's Moving?, Chapter 22: Why Do All the Clocks Agree?.
This answer comes from OPH, Observer Patch Holography. OPH is a rigorous, consistent and complete description of the unified, self-creating computational Universe we inhabit. Its consistency is machine-checked: the fixed point at its core is constructed explicitly, and a theory with a model contains no contradiction.
To understand OPH and check every step yourself, start with the free book Reverse Engineering Reality. It builds the theory from the ground up, and the OPH Notebook answers your questions while you read.
read the free bookask the notebookor ask sage:read chapter 16: Why Does Time Run, and Only One Way?watch a universe make its own particles