Mario Boido

The hard problem of consciousness persists in part because consciousness is often treated as an additional property that must be explained after neural processes, cognitive functions, and representational systems have already been described. This paper proposes a different starting point. Drawing on phenomenology, predictive processing, cognitive psychology, and research on the default mode network, it presents the Phenomenology of the Human Experience of Time (PHET) as a framework for understanding consciousness as the temporally integrated experience of a world unfolding in time. PHET argues that consciousness is not a static inner object or a mysterious supplement to cognition, but the dynamic integration of three temporal operations: recollection of the past, evaluative attention to the present, and anticipatory projection toward the future. These operations allow the organism to segment change into meaningful events, organize experience around “what” is happening and “why” it matters, and maintain a coherent sense of self and world across time. This framework offers a functional and phenomenological account of why consciousness appears as lived experience rather than as information processing alone. It also helps bridge first-person phenomenology and third-person neuroscience by identifying temporally integrative processes — including autobiographical memory, future simulation, self-referential processing, and narrative coherence — as central to conscious experience. The default mode network is considered as a plausible neural substrate for these large-scale integrative functions. By reframing consciousness as temporally integrated meaning-making, PHET seeks to dissolve rather than solve the hard problem. The question is no longer how subjective experience is added to physical processes, but how temporally structured systems generate the meaningful unfolding through which a world and a self appear at all.

Mario Boido is a faculty member in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Waterloo. His current research develops the Phenomenology of the Human Experience of Time (PHET), an interdisciplinary framework that examines consciousness as the temporal integration of recollection, attention, and expectation. Drawing on phenomenology, philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience, including work on the default mode network and predictive processing, his work seeks to bridge first-person accounts of lived experience with third-person accounts of neural and cognitive processes. His broader research explores memory, identity, cultural production, and decolonial thought in Latin American contexts.