Temporal Experience and Phenomenological Flow

This paper develops a structural account of temporal experience within a framework that treats irreversible time as primitive and commitment as persistent state-space reduction. Subjective temporal flow is not taken as an independent ontological feature, but as the internal manifestation of successive irreversible commitments. Each commitment excludes admissible future trajectories in a manner that cannot be reversed; ordered accumulation of such exclusions generates directionality, continuity, and irreversibility in experience. The distinction between externally measured duration and felt duration is explained as a divergence between metric time and commitment density. Variations in perceived temporal speed correspond to differences in the rate and magnitude of state-space contraction, while states described as timeless correspond to suspension of new binding events despite ongoing irreversible time. The account remains substrate-neutral and derives phenomenological structure directly from constraint topology under temporal irreversibility.