Cyclical
From a conversation with Grok. Only my side is shown.
I believe that most process are cyclic - which means that when we widen our gaze or increase the observational duration (in terms of time and processes) we can notice common patterns and these patterns repeat. One such example is evolution and the behavior of mammals. On a small duration, it might an action from an individual mammal may look like it is not branching towards evolution - it might appear contradictory, but when observed over a large proportion and a longer duration of time we might observe that they are optimizing for more reproduction or efficient reproduction. This is extremely hard to refute.
I want to safely generalize this concept and apply it to more and more processes so that I can understand their optimization function and goal - again the aim here is not to analyze an individual but make some kind of probabilistic prediction of the trend.
one strain I identify this is the work an individual does to optimize for food, modern society allows a lot more flexibility by introducing intellectual work streams which were not possible earlier, a person can specialize in something like radio jockey which did not exist 200 years ago. This is a pattern - a certain kinds of individuals are more attracted towards show business, where much of the attention is on how you present yourself (and your views) to the general public (in order to make it entertaining). This should also be complemented by the knowledge of that subject and finesse in the art.
Another pattern is the “winner takes all” trend by the introduction of connectivity and social networks, previously an okay radio jockey would suffice for a local radio station, but with internet, everyone has access to the best radio jockey for their language, AI bridges this further by introducing live translation. So there is a trend towards winner takes all, only the best of the best have access to everything in that field.
I believe that an increase in consciousness is the direct result of an increase in pain - and it is again a cyclic process, where more consciousness leads to more fine grained pain. Pain in my definition is any kind of contraction - physical (muscular/ skeletal) or mental(awareness, attention). Starting with the first unicellular organism who started developing a brain was a deficiency signal (or contraction) in the supply of food, a neuron could solve for that by developing an increased consciousness (awareness) for food detection. And we can keep building on this analogy.
However this is a slippery slope with increasingly complex systems, as there might be emergent new pains which might be ghouls - eg the concept of self.