“ the equations that govern reality don’t have a preference for which way time flows”
Which proves that equations have nothing to do with reality. Time is a human construct, not a natural phenomenon and if we think about it as a philosopher rather than a physicist might, there is no present, only the past. In terms of, for example, the time a computer takes to process a simple instruction, there is a time delay between our sensory organs receiving information, sending it through the nervous system to the brain and for the brain to process it and understand how it affects us, there is a time delay. So we do not experience the present, what we experience actually happened a fraction of a millisecond ago. And that is why time can only flow forward. The past cannot be undone or changed because it has already happened.