Emergent Temporal Orientation and Temporal Transition Awareness

Abstract This paper develops a conceptual framework for understanding lived temporality that preserves realism about physical time while explaining how time is experienced as ordered, directional, and continuously passing. The framework distinguishes between Emergent Temporal Orientation (ETO) and Temporal Transition Awareness (TTA). Emergent Temporal Orientation explains how mind-independent temporal processes—such as change, succession, duration, and irreversibility—are organized by cognitive systems into the meaningful categories of past, present, and future. Temporal Transition Awareness accounts for the lived sense of temporal passage, understood not as a perception of a moving present but as the ongoing transition of experience from anticipation into memory. By separating temporal orientation from temporal awareness, the account clarifies why the present is experienced as elusive yet real, and why felt duration varies with affective and cognitive integration without implying changes in physical time itself. The framework complements physical and metaphysical theories of time by addressing a structural feature of temporal experience that those accounts leave underexplained.