The MoM Consciousness Theory Posits:

• The fundamental constitution of consciousness involves having multiple goals, and continuously adjudicating across such goals so as to operationalize action continuously in the world.

  • These goals are the modest byproduct over time of the optimization strategies which organisms utilized in various environments, with a tendency for increasing complexity over time due to continuous optimization to a changing environment. The trend of increasing complexity over time from continuous optimization is a phenomenon known as gradual descent.

  • As an organism’s goals, goal hierarchies, and the process of adjudicating across such goals and goal hierarchies become more complex, so too do the organism’s corollary actions and corollary mechanisms increase in complexity.

  • Nonetheless, the goals, goal hierarchies, corollary actions in the world, and corollary mechanisms are all evolutionarily-derived as attempts to achieve evolutionarily-directed inclusive fitness.

    • These goals form not as a matter of intentionality, but the intersectionality of the Darwinian byproduct of embodiment meeting the world via inclusive fitness, i.e., random variation then survival of the fittest.

• While some goals amongst the hierarchy are more readily operationalizable or useful, human consciousness is thoroughly filled with ‘ghost in the machine’ goals which may become operationalized when the appropriate threshold of mechanistic conditions arise (e.g., like an unnecessary anti-tilt mechanism in a digital pinball machine).