Fundamentals of process neuropsychology

An examination of the whole-to-part transition over phases, from potential to actual in the specification of a concrete entity, as in the momentary mind/brain state, reveals patterns of change that can be considered a first approximation to the foundational laws of cognition. These laws, which amount to a theory of universal change, apply as well to the becoming or actualization of non-cognitive entities. Thus, the thesis is advanced that the mental and the physical actualize a generic process and that a theory of this process, process monism, is a metaphysics of the antecedents of occasions of fact or the laws of change that deliver objects. The commonality of the mental and the physical lies in the conceptuality of the duration of becoming and its continuity with the duration of the conscious present. The before/after relation that characterizes the phase-transitions in a non-cognitive entity is the seed of the past/present relation in consciousness. The connectedness of past and present arises as a feeling of the relation of antecedent phases imminent in a concrete particular. The theory rejects as regressive the elimination of consciousness by a reduction to the material, or the reverse, in idealism, as well as an emergence of consciousness from material states. A deep current of connectedness runs from the nature of conscious phenomena to the categories of existence at the level of the atom.