Why feeling begins in time: The temporogenesis argument

Three literatures describe the temporal structure of experience — phenomenology its retentional-protentional form, predictive processing its dynamics, chronobiology its mechanisms — and none explains why that structure is present or why it is felt. Both follow from the conditions of self-maintenance. A system whose viability depends on what is not yet present, and whose stakes are distributed across its own history rather than concentrated in the instant, cannot meet those stakes by reaction, by an entrained rhythm, or by feed-forward wiring fixed to ancestral regularities; it must integrate its retained past and anticipated future into the organization by which it persists. This integration is temporogenesis, the second threshold in the framework’s cumulative sequence, operating on the mattering autopoiesis constitutes; felt mattering — the minimal phenomenal interior, sentience — is what the integration is from within, by constitutive identity rather than causation. One distinction carries the argument: the threshold is crossed by self-maintenance that is constitutively temporally extended, not by a system that computes a model of time. That distinction is at once the forcing step of the necessity argument, the lower-boundary criterion separating oscillators, feed-forward systems, and externalized memories from the organization that crosses, and the framework’s location among its neighbors — above the enactive tradition’s bare adaptivity, which can be the computed kind, and below the neural-architecture theories’ insistence on a brain. The criterion is clean at its poles and graded at one boundary: basal systems whose allostatic regulation integrates their own viability history are the open empirical case, where the computed and constitutive readings remain to be told apart, and where the verdict bears on the sentience-indicator approach now used to decide which animals receive legal protection.