Mario Boido

This paper proposes a new approach to consciousness by grounding it in the phenomenology of the human experience of time. Rather than treating experience as an additional property layered onto information-processing, the phenomenology of the human experience of time (PHET) reconceptualizes consciousness as the dynamic integration of past experience, present circumstances, and anticipated futures into a coherent multisensory experience of meaningful patterns. The paper develops this account by showing how meaningful distinctions in experience emerge from the organism’s temporally structured engagement with its environment, thereby dissolving the gap between first-person experience and third-person explanation. It then advances a unifying framework for understanding memory, perception, and future simulation as interdependent components of a single integrative process and applies this framework to debates concerning the ontology of situated experience, the structure of individual and collective memory, and the (dis)continuism debate surrounding mental time travel. Finally, it draws on empirical findings in cognitive neuroscience to argue that the hierarchical organization of the brain provides a natural substrate for this process of temporal integration. By reframing consciousness as temporal integration, PHET shows that ‘what it is like’ to experience the world is inseparable from the process of making temporally extended sense of it. This approach not only offers a functional redefinition of consciousness but also reorients debates across fields by emphasizing temporality as constitutive human experience.

The quantum measurement problem has long been framed as a conflict between the continuous, unitary evolution of quantum systems and the discrete, definite events that appear in experience. This white paper argues that the problem arises not within physics, but at the interface between physical description and the temporal structure of consciousness. Quantum mechanics describes potentials—amplitudes, correlations, and evolving relations—but it contains no resources for generating events, definiteness, or a present moment. These belong to the phenomenology of experience. Drawing on the Phenomenology of the Human Experience of Time (PHET), I develop an account of how consciousness synthesizes retention (the just-past), presence (the unfolding now), and anticipation (the imminent future) into discrete events. On this view, “collapse” is not a physical process but the experiential actualization of a physical interaction. Classicality does not emerge from physics; it emerges from the temporal organization of consciousness. This framework dissolves the measurement problem, completes relational quantum mechanics, clarifies the appearance of classical definiteness, and reconciles quantum formalism with lived reality—all without modifying the physics. Events arise in experience, not in physical ontology.