Consciousness as the Phenomenological Experience of Finitude: Temporal Asymmetry and the Global Determination of the World

This paper develops a conception of consciousness compatible with a model of global ontological determination and a block universe ontology of time. It argues that consciousness should not be understood as an additional faculty, substance, or ontological opening, but rather as the phenomenological experience proper to a finite being embedded in a world that is ontologically complete and temporally non-dynamic. In such a framework, time does not “flow” or “pass”; instead, past, present, and future coexist within the structure of the world in the same sense as spatial dimensions. What appears to “flow” is the phenomenological experience of a finite agent whose epistemic access to the world is temporally asymmetric. The paper integrates a post-realization modal collapse framework, according to which genuine ontological possibility exists only prior to the realization of a single world. Once realization occurs, the modal space collapses and the world becomes globally determined. Within this ontological setting, the experience of temporal passage, deliberation, and openness is shown to arise not from any ontological becoming, but from the asymmetric epistemic access of finite agents to a temporally extended but ontologically static world. Consciousness is thus reconceived as the necessary phenomenological correlate of finitude in a block universe, rather than as an anomaly requiring metaphysical supplementation.