Temporal Experience and Human State Field: Toward a New Framework Bridging Physics and Perception Part I-Basic Arguments, Concepts, and Definitions

This paper introduces the concept of Human State Field as a proposed framework for understanding how individuals perceive and experience time. We explore how various internal and external inputs affect this field, shaping subjective temporal experience. Our aim is to explore possible connections between the human cognitive sense of time and the concept of time as understood in physics. We begin by examining how people form familiarity with the notion of time and cognitively accept temporal phenomena. We then analyze how the human experience of time connects to emotional and perceptual responses during brief episodes of daily life, thereby shaping one’s broader experience of time. Central to our discussion are the notions of now and here, treated as perceptual anchors, and how these merge phenomenologically with physical representations of time. We also introduce the novel concepts of Time of Position and Time of Person, investigating how these dimensions interact and sometimes conflict within human experience. The framework aims to support a more integrated understanding of time that is informed by phenomenological insights and compatible with physical descriptions, without claiming a full theoretical unification. This part concludes by exploring how different internal and external factors could affect the human state field, and in a follow-up study (Part II), we aim to mathematically model the dynamics of the Human State Field. The present article develops the conceptual foundations of the framework; formal modeling and empirical operationalization are reserved for a subsequent study.