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If you're familiar with Zeno's Paradoxes, I could argue how time can't be formed of infinite "nows" or "instants" because it would prove that motion is logically impossible. Perhaps time is quantized like photons and we are just "hopping" or teleporting to each segment.
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Yeah I think you're right there, one of the things with Zeno's paradox is that while infinity is a useful concept for math, it isn't necessarily a feature of our physical reality. So at some point those teeny tiny time slices reach an end to how teeny tiny they can be, and time progresses.
I always figured that the rate at which we experience time, depends on how fast our brain can process change. Like if your brain was more effecient at processing reality, you might experience time as if it were slower than other people experience it. Really since there is no way of comparing such an experience, that could be what happens.
A couple things I've noticed in my own life, is that when I watch something on TV or in a movie for the 2nd time, it seems to go faster than the first time I saw it. Like I see a movie, and I have a feeling for how long it is, but when I see the movie again it feels like it goes faster, and is shorter in total length, even though all the content is the same.
Also when I was a kid, time seemed to pass alot slower, a half hour car ride or a half hour tv show seemed to be lengthy events. Now either of those seems relatively quick. I chalk that up to maybe a child's mind is doing alot more learning, so the brain is clinging on to time(or the relative rate of change) more, in a sense, or processing it faster, so things seem to progress slower.
I spose the same reason for the seeing a movie the 1st time, and being a child could have time seemnig slower, is that the brain seems to make our consciousness experience things as being slower, if it is trying to intake more new information than normal.
Another thing is that we only experience time in relation to things.
Kind of an appropriate quote from Scott Adam's "God's Debris"
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"How do you explain Zeno's Paradox?"
"Imagine that everything in existence disappears and then reappears. How much time expires while everything is gone?"
"How should I know? You're the one making up the example. How much?"
"No time passes. It can't because time is a human concept of how things change compared to other things. If everything in the universe disappears, nothing exists to change compared to other things, so there is no time."
"What if everything disappears except for me and my wristwatch?" I asked.
"Then you would experience the passing of time in relation to yourself and to your watch. And when the rest of the universe reappeared you could check how much time had passed according to your watch. But the people in the rest of the universe would have experience no time while they were gone. To them, you instantly aged. Their time and your time were not the same because you experienced change and they did not. There is no universal time clock; time differs for every observer."
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But I'm still hopelessly short of any kind of answer for why we experience time in only one direction.