From a certain point of view, fairly well backed by experimental data, we do not experience anything in real time, we only experience the memory of things. In that sense, there is no consciousness, other than a collection of related memories to which attention is being afforded by the personality, and the record of that attention occurring.
Sensations like deja vu corroborate that our ongoing experience is actually a slightly delayed memory, and not a real-time process. In deja vu a deduction or other consequence from an experience is processed faster than the other data entailed in the experience itself is stored in memory. This leads us to feel like we knew what we have just learned previously in far too complete a level of detail, and therefore we must have had the exact same experience previously. If we had a real mental test for real experience vs memory, this we would be able to separate the two copies of the current experience, and stop the sensation. Since we don't, the sensation persists despite our logical insistence upon the arrow of time.
It also seems convincing that if I constituted an exact copy of the set of memories added to my experience since yesterday, and somehow translated them for your memory and inserted them, you would feel as though you experienced my yesterday. But memory already recorded changes over time: we can have thought our childhood bedroom was blue, only to return to that house later and find it was slightly green. Someone with confabulation due to rolling amnesia continually creates the impression for themselves that they have experienced many years of artificial history, and there does not seem to be a real way in which to tell them that they haven't. How is real accumulated memory significantly different? So how do we presume that we have in fact experienced the stream of consciousness that we remember: That it has not been added later, like voice-over in a film, either after a split second, or after a lifetime?
Between these two ideas, the notion of personal consciousness vanishes. The continuity of consciousness is dubious or subjective. Really, there is only attention focused on a given set of memories. Qualia may exist, but they can do so only as categories in our classification of the contents of memory.
Basically, if you are not a physicalist, given the observed nature of very-short-term memory you cannot know that time exists independent of shared memory. If you are one, you already presume memory is a chemical process and that it is sufficiently robust to support the associative structure necessary to hold vocabulary.
This renders the 'hard' problem less hard. If qualia are labels, and experiences are memory-impressions, there is no real conflict between the perspectives that allow for mental components in experience and those that insist that experience is entirely physical. We do not consider associative conventions like vocabulary to be truly physical, even if we are physicalists. Nor do we find it a spooky evasion of common sense to admit that memories and classifications of our experiences are real.