Felt Time: The Phenomenological Present as the Ground of Temporal Experience

Contemporary physics increasingly suggests that time may not be fundamental, while neuroscience treats subjective temporality as constructed and elastic. Yet conscious experience is invariably characterized by a vivid sense of presence—a felt "now"—that persists across all states. This paper introduces Felt Time: the intrinsic phenomenological present that underlies all experience but is not reducible to clocks, sequences, or representations. I argue that Felt Time is not a perception of time, but the ground condition from which temporal concepts are projected. This reversal of the explanatory arrow reframes debates in phenomenology, neuroscience, and physics, and provides a candidate phenomenosignature for consciousness itself. A neurophenomenological protocol is proposed to test Felt Time's invariance across conditions where clock-time perception varies.

Keywords: phenomenology, time consciousness, phenomenosignatures, temporal experience, neurophenomenology