This couldn’t work in reverse or independent of time.

No, we can't make it happen in reverse in the perception of time we need to have consciousness.

It's not that everything has to confirm to how we experience it. It's that we can only observe things in the way we can experience it.

Now, while Penrose finished up Einsteins work on relativity, I get most people do t know who he is.

But even Einstein himself disagreed with you before Penrose finished it.

Einstein’s statement was not merely an attempt at consolation. Many physicists argue that Einstein’s position is implied by the two pillars of modern physics: Einstein’s masterpiece, the general theory of relativity, and the Standard Model of particle physics. The laws that underlie these theories are time-symmetric — that is, the physics they describe is the same, regardless of whether the variable called “time” increases or decreases. Moreover, they say nothing at all about the point we call “now” — a special moment (or so it appears) for us, but seemingly undefined when we talk about the universe at large. The resulting timeless cosmos is sometimes called a “block universe” — a static block of space-time in which any flow of time, or passage through it, must presumably be a mental construct or other illusion.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-debate-over-the-physics-of-time-20160719/

Serious, if you're saying time is constant and can only flow in one direction, you're arguing with the literal foundation physics is built on.

Time just isn't a necessity for anything except consciousness.

This is crazy complicated though, and I'm not even going to pretend to understand all of it. So it's hard to explain. I'd suggest a lot of reading if you want to know more rather than me try to summarize.

But yes, if you do the actual physics of something being set on fire, the equation works just fine both ways

Instead of saying it can only work one way, it's more accurate to say a consciousness can only experience it one way. Which might not even be technically true.

A self contained universe with fixed energy and infite time will eventually see a pile of ash turned into an apple. And it wouldn't violate a damn thing with our system of physics.

Edit:

Specifically for causal stuff:

Show a person a causaul relationship out of order (acb rather than abc) and they're report that they observed abc. The conscious mind can't rationalize acb, so it overrides it

This may very well be happening constantly and we just don't even know it.

All this stuff is incredibly interesting, it's just even harder to wrap our minds around, because our minds may have evolved to handle all this stuff as a background process. Because consciousness needs to experience stuff in abc order to make any sense out of anything.

It's a real mindfuck, literally. There's a very good chance we'll never be able to understand because we're conscious