Consciousness Is Evolution in Real Time: A Deterministic Accessibility Account

Consciousness is argued to be identical to whatever neural or mnemonic representation is momentarily the most accessible, given the brain's history and current context. Drawing on Tulving's availability-accessibility distinction and evidence from working memory, attentional blink, priming, and neuromodulation, the authors propose that the stream of consciousness is a deterministic sequence of state transitions governed by relative accessibility. This stream is not a by-product but a continuation of the same dynamic operating across evolutionary, developmental, and cultural timescales, now unfolding at psychological speed. The account reframes the hard problem of consciousness as a tractable question about accessibility mechanisms and generates testable predictions about priming, mind-wandering, and clinical disruptions.

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Abstract

This paper argues that the moment-to-moment content of phenomenal consciousness is identical to whichever neural or mnemonic representation is, at that instant, transiently the most accessible given the system’s causal history and current embedding context. Building on Tulving’s distinction between availability and accessibility, together with empirical work on working-memory constraints, attentional blink, priming, and neuromodulation, we argue that the “stream of consciousness” (James, 1890) is a serial, determined sequence of state transitions governed by relative accessibility. A broader claim is advanced: the stream of consciousness is not an accidental by-product of slower adaptive processes but the real-time continuation of the same abstract dynamic that operates across evolutionary, developmental, and cultural timescales, only here unfolding at psychological speed. The account is deterministic (or near-deterministic) at the psychological level, reframes the hard problem of consciousness as a tractable question about accessibility mechanisms, and remains neutral on low-level physical indeterminism. It is compatible with major neuroscientific findings and generates contrasting predictions about priming effects, mind-wandering sequences, conscious transitions under neuromodulation, and clinical disruptions of conscious seriality.