Slide 49: Participant-Process Complementarity: Participant As Persistent, Process As Unfolding

[yin/yang diagram of Participant/Process complementarity; background: Salvador Dali's The Persistence Of Memory]

Now, as Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 133-4) point out, a defining distinction between (congruent) processes and participants is that processes unfold through time, whereas participants are persistent through time.

So, in the case of consciousness, the mental process of sensing unfolds through time, whereas the participant senser is persistent through time; and likewise the verbal process of saying unfolds through time, whereas the sayer is persistent through time.

Now, let’s explore the notion of conscious participants as persistent through time.  One way we can do this is by taking a material perspective on consciousness.  This is viewing consciousness from its material substrate: the organism on whose anatomy and physiology consciousness supervenes.