Felt Authorship

Felt authorship is the specific phenomenological experience of a product as one's own in a sense deeper than the legal or functional. When one retains the full temporal sequence of a creative process, one experiences the product as having emerged from one's own decisions — step by step, through a process one lived through and can retrospectively survey. The product is one's own not merely in the property sense but in the constitutive sense of having been constituted through one's own temporally articulated engagement. The Husserl volume identifies the erosion of felt authorship as a specific consequence of retentional collapse in AI-augmented work. The product may still be one's own in every practical sense — one directed the process, evaluated the output, made the shaping decisions. But the phenomenological sense of ownership is attenuated by the loss of retentional depth. The builder who cannot retrace the temporal sequence of decisions experiences a version of the authorship uncertainty Segal describes when he asks who is writing this book and finds the