Each microgeny unfolds over patterns deposited in the previous traversal, and the retracing of these patterns configures the next unfolding. there are vertical constraints on the bottom-up flow that determine what survives in the passage from depth to surface, and there are horizontal constraints in the seriation of each bottom-up sequence that limit the degrees of freedom of one microgenetic series from those that precede it.

Creativity is a flight from deliberation in the service of a concept rising from below. This is also true for the deep appreciation of creative work. One can say, truly, that you discover the creative by falling into its parts and letting them discover you.

The mental life has a depth beneath awareness and a surface punctuated by conscious events. The subconscious is not a form of mentation complementary to consciousness, but a preliminary stage in the derivation of consciousness. That the contents of awareness rest on and develop out of subsurface mentation is evident from dream analytic work, psycho-pathological case study, and the effects of brain injury.

What mind perceives is the substance of what mind is for the moment of that perception. A perception is not a space punctuated by objects; there is no empty space out there, only one enormous object, the world.

Will be catching up for a few days

The self is generated in the course of object development. The self is another type of object, an intrapersonal object that appears side by side with other perceptual contents.

Structure is the illusion of stability in a system in continuous transformation. For any mind/brain state there is a temporal context, a before and an after, within which that state is embedded. The state is configured by the context and cannot be extracted as an independent event. There is no brain state that corresponds to a word or a percept… Where in this process is the state corresponding to the word? One can isolate neither the brain state nor its psychological counterpart. Perhaps a segment of brain activity can be mapped to a segment of mental flow, but this is not the same as mapping one state to another. In a process model, structural units are like mental snapshots, moments in the life of process artificially frozen in time.

(Regarding modularity:) The parsing of cognition into a collection of elements does not account for the blending of elements in a given behavior, nor the unitary nature of mind across those elements. Theorists attempt to deal with this problem by postulating “central” systems that receive and elaborate input from different modules. Since the nature and boundaries of central systems are undemarcated, new modules can proliferate unchecked. In fact, the very assumption of modularity necessitates the postulation of vague central systems to account for the continuity and unity of normal behavior.

Change is not extrinsic to structure but permeates the concept of what a structure is. In fact, the presence of change at the core of a structure, the stability of which is illusory, teaches us that the present (the slice through process to obtain structure) is contingent on a past through which it is actively elaborated. The present rides on the crest of a past that is resurgent, an ever-expanding past, always, in pursuit of a present that cannot be demarcated, a present that dissolves away the instant it appears.

Mind stabilizes objects by creating durations within which change is imperceptible… Since we cannot perceive change in objects and still perceive them, change is deflected to the relation between objects in space and time; that is, a change in the spatial and temporal position of an object.

Objects and events differ in duration… An object that changes quickly is a process. A process that changes slowly is an object.