Temporal Experience and Phenomenological Flow

This paper develops a structural account of temporal experience within a framework that treats irreversible time as primitive and commitment as persistent state-space reduction. Subjective temporal flow is not taken as an independent ontological feature, but as the internal manifestation of successive irreversible commitments. Each commitment excludes admissible future trajectories in a manner that cannot be reversed; ordered accumulation of such exclusions generates directionality, continuity, and irreversibility in experience. The distinction between externally measured duration and felt duration is explained as a divergence between metric time and commitment density. Variations in perceived temporal speed…