This paper presents a unifying structural interpretation of temporal experience and cognition based on admissible sequence traversal within a network of possible states. Building on prior work examining dream waking and blackout conditions and extending the admissible sequence network model into cognition both time and thought are interpreted as stabilised paths through constraint defined possibility space. States are represented as nodes and transitions as edges with admissibility acting as the governing constraint on allowable transitions. While non linear access to states exists at the level of possibility only sequences satisfying structural compatibility are realised as coherent experience. The framework demonstrates that temporal ordering cognitive flow and experiential continuity arise from the same underlying mechanism constraint driven path stabilisation within an admissible network. Temporal and cognitive processes are therefore not separate phenomena but domain specific instantiations of the same structural principle. This work integrates and unifies prior publications including Dream State Nonlinear Time and Sequence Based Temporal Experience Admissible Sequence Networks and Cognitive Sequence Mapping forming a coherent structural framework linking temporal experience sequence formation and cognition within the Paton System.
Andrew John Paton (Fri,) studied this question.