Time as Constructed and Real: Integrating Cognitive Science with Existential Realism

Existential Realism (ER) is an ontological framework that distinguishes existence from reality in the context of time. In brief, ER holds that only the present moment and its contents exist in the full ontological sense, yet much more than the present is real. Past events and future possibilities, though they do not exist now, are nonetheless real insofar as they leave traces, have causal effects, or figure in well-founded predictions. This two-tiered view is meant to reconcile epistemic humility about what we can directly observe (only the present) with a robust ontological realism about the world’s structure across time. In other words, ER asserts an objective world of matter, laws, and forces that unfolds in time, while acknowledging that our access to non-present times is indirect—mediated by memory, records, and inference.One potential gap in the current ER framework is the role of the human mind in structuring our experience of time. ER recognizes that we know the past through records and remember it, and anticipate the future through predictions, but it does not yet deeply explore how our brains and cognitive processes actively construct the subjective flow of time. Cognitive science and constructivist theories of mind suggest that time is not just “out there” in the world; it is also a mental representational construct that our minds assemble through processes like memory, narrative, anticipation, and temporal perception. Classic phenomenological philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson, as well as modern cognitive scientists like Thomas Metzinger, have all emphasized that the stream of time we experience is shaped by consciousness. This report examines how integrating such insights from cognitive constructivism could enrich the ER framework. In particular, we will highlight cognitive science concepts – narrative memory, anticipatory processing, temporal binding, mental time travel, and the overall construction of subjective temporal experience – and evaluate whether ER currently underrepresents this subjective dimension of time. We then explore how ER’s temporal ontology could accommodate the fact that human access to past and future is structured by internal models, without compromising ER’s realist stance on an objective temporal reality. Finally, we address potential tensions between being epistemically humble (acknowledging the limits and constructions of our knowledge) and maintaining ontological realism, clarifying whether treating time as cognitively constructed undermines or, conversely, supports ER’s distinction between existence and reality.