Abstract

This phenomenological analysis defines consciousness as the interpretation of the human experience of time. As our embodied existence in the world unfolds over time, consciousness integrates our multisensory experiences of the past, the present, and the future, and generates our evolving sense of self and identity. This approach is consistent with the main features of predictive coding and the free energy principle and offers a functional definition of consciousness that resolves the hard problem by bridging the explanatory gap.