Introduction

Welcome friend! My name is Seth Surface, and I would be delighted to share with you the answer to the single question that has guided nearly every reading, note, and late-night realization for the past three years: what is the mind, and how did it come to be?

Admittedly, for much of that time, I didn’t realize this was the question I was circling. Rather, through a potent cocktail mix composed of part accident, part luck, and a large dose of personal grievance (see “About Me” section), I seemed to have accidentally woven together what I would gradually come to recognize as a triadic foundation for exploring how adaptive behavior, conscious awareness, imagination, and belief arise from the continual integration of ecological truth and social meaning through embodied action.

All models are wrong; the key lies in knowing how they’re useful—and where they fall short.
With that in mind, this work represents a discovered synthesis of three major, though disparate, contributions to the cognitive-behavioral sciences.
My thesis argues that Dr. Van Leeuwen’s “first map”, Dr. Murray’s “goal system”, and Dr. Siegel’s “Wheel of Awareness” each describe, from distinct disciplinary vantage points, the same underlying cognitive mechanism—the adaptive engine that makes perception, learning, and belief possible.
Each provides a necessary, though partial, image of the same underlying process; my own reconstruction merely adds another contour to that ever-unfinished sketch of mind.

• Dr. Daniel Siegel’s The Developing Mind opened the door to systems thinking, conceptualizing awareness as an attention-based regulatory process and emotion as the subjective signal of shifting integration. Much of this model’s systemic framing—particularly the integration of awareness, emotion, and regulation—derives from Siegel’s conception of mind as an emergent, self-organizing flow of energy and information.
• Dr. Neil Van Leeuwen’s Religion as Make-Believe provided the explicit descriptive blueprint of a two-map cognitive architecture—distinguishing factual belief from imaginative simulation—though it remains largely non-mechanistic. This work reconstructs that structure in functional and evolutionary terms, rendering it mechanistically tractable.
• Dr. Elisabeth Murray and colleagues’ The Evolution of Memory Systems grounds the model in comparative neuroscience, detailing how the prefrontal-parietal network evolved to integrate multiple representational domains. I came to this text last, and its clarity felt like discovering a slide at the top of the mountain—the missing mechanism that allowed the rest to fall into place.

The Continual Reality Tracker (CRT)

The Origin of Mind

The emergence of the Continual Reality Tracker (CRT) marks what can meaningfully be called the origin of mind (in functional rather than temporal terms): the first moment when the flow of energy and information within an organism became self-regulating in its relation to the environment. Rather than replacing older neural architectures, the CRT arose by augmenting them—layering flexible top-down control atop reflexive, biased-competition systems that already managed attention and reinforcement. The prefrontal cortex began to extend its influence across the sensory, navigational, and motivational domains, creating a unified “goal system” capable of coordinating perception, memory, and action toward adaptive ends.

Mechanism and Function

At its core, the CRT performs continual reality tracking: an unbroken loop of encoding → prediction → action → outcome → revision (encoding).
It recruits stored priors from memory to generate a stable yet adaptable model of the environment and updates that model automatically whenever prediction errors arise. The mechanism thereby transforms raw perception into a functional simulation of the world—one continuously refined through behavioral feedback.

This process embodies how Neil Van Leeuwen describes the first map as behaving. In what follows, I translate Van Leeuwen’s four traits, as they describe the first map, into their mechanistic correlates - not as revisions, but as operational restatements—phrased to clarify how the first map’s epistemic features would manifest as neural and behavioral processes:

• Involuntariness → automatic coherence enforcement,
• Evidential vulnerability → reality-constrained updating,
• Non-compartmentalization → continual behavioral guidance, and
• Cognitive governance → hierarchical inferential control.

In biological terms, these traits describe a system whose internal coherence and external correction are inseparable: the CRT believes because it must act, and it acts because it must believe.

Attentional Coherency Seeking (ACS-I): The Flow Within

Within the CRT, Attentional Coherency Seeking (ACS) operates as the regulatory current that maintains informational stability. Through its prefrontal-cortical networks, the system continuously directs attention toward whichever representations—sensory, mnemonic, or motivational—carry the greatest adaptive salience. When attention flows outward to external stimuli, perception arises; when it turns inward toward stored representations, memory-based imagery emerges.
As Murray et al. note, the same top-down mechanism governs both: the prefrontal cortex “promotes the perception of attended stimulus features” and likewise “promotes the perception of attended intentions, actions, and other internal states.” Thus, perception and imagination are not separate faculties but distinct attentional orientations within a single self-regulating loop.
Through this continual redistribution of attentional energy, the CRT becomes a self-correcting engine of coherence. Each action functions as an experiment, testing the fidelity of the system’s beliefs against reality; each outcome feeds back into the network, recalibrating its priors and attentional weights. Over evolutionary time, this recursive cycle of attention, perception, and correction produced what we now experience as awareness—the mind’s sensitivity to its own representational stability through time.
And yet, coherence alone is insufficient for survival. For the system to adapt, it must evaluate the consequences of its actions, distinguishing those that enhance fit from those that undermine it. It is through this evaluative function that beliefs emerge and the utilitarian value system takes form.

Belief Formation and the Utilitarian Value System

Within this architecture, beliefs are not abstract propositions but stabilized, action-guiding models—representations that have proven reliable through iterative behavioral testing. Success and failure in achieving goals provide the CRT’s evaluative metric. While Van Leeuwen discusses what he calls the utilitarian value system primarily in contrast to the sacred value system, his account implies that it underlies the motivational grounding of factual belief—the valuation structure through which the first map forms an intrinsic feedback network, strengthening effective world-models and dissolving maladaptive ones. In this way, truth becomes not a metaphysical ideal but an ecological necessity—the accuracy required for survival. The CRT learns by performing reality; it acts in order to know.

At the linguistic level, propositional beliefs can be understood as explicit verbalizations of these implicit, action-guiding models. Language externalizes the evaluative logic of the CRT, transforming embodied predictions into communicable statements about the world (‘the apple is red,’ ‘the ground is safe,’ ‘the gods are pleased’). Thus, propositional belief is not a distinct kind of cognition but a cultural articulation of the same feedback architecture.

In ontogeny, this mechanism manifests early. Renée Baillargeon’s studies on infant surprise reveal predictive error-detection long before language. Alison Gopnik’s “theory theory” shows how children, like scientists, generate and revise causal hypotheses through play and exploration. These developmental patterns recapitulate the CRT’s essential loop: perception → expectation → test → revision. The child’s mind is thus a living CRT—tracking reality, learning its causal grammar, and building the scaffolds of belief one feedback cycle at a time.

The Continual Social Simulator (CSS)

The Evolution of Meaning

If the CRT marks the Origin of Mind, the emergence of the Continual Social Simulator (CSS) marks the Origin of Meaning.

 As hominins evolved, survival depended not only on tracking the physical world but on navigating social environments dense with shared norms, goals, and symbolic frameworks. Where the CRT learns through acting upon the world, the CSS learns through imagining action within it—allowing an agent to simulate possible outcomes before acting, to explore counterfactuals, and to coordinate with others through shared symbols and stories.

Built upon the factual scaffolding of the CRT, the CSS functions as a representational workspace for modeling as-if realities—social, hypothetical, and symbolic. It enables agents to infer others’ intentions, anticipate reactions, and participate in shared imaginative contexts such as play, ritual, or narrative. In Van Leeuwen’s framework, this corresponds to the secondary cognitive attitudes—modes of thinking like pretending, supposing, and believing-as-if—which each arise in specialized practical settings, situations where motivational cues invite temporarily suspending strict factual alignment.

Voluntariness and Make-Believe Behavior

While the simulations generated by the CSS arise automatically, entering them behaviorally—that is, performing make-believe—is voluntary. Imagination emerges spontaneously from associative and perceptual networks, but make-believe behavior—acting as if the imagined scenario were real—is an intentional adoption of that cognitive frame. This distinction clarifies the voluntary nature of secondary attitudes: the agent chooses to inhabit the imaginative frame, aware of its departure from factual truth. Whether in a child’s pretend game, a theatrical performance, or a communal ritual, this voluntary participation allows the mind to explore alternative realities while preserving its grounding in the factual coherence maintained by the CRT.

Mechanism and Function

Neurobiologically, the CSS extends the CRT’s architecture through expanded connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and temporal and limbic regions, enabling complex relational modeling and emotional abstraction. Murray et al. describe how these circuits support semantic integration and goal representation across social and symbolic domains. Functionally, the CSS serves as the brain’s imaginative simulator—constructing internally coherent yet evidentially optional models that make future planning, empathy, and cultural meaning possible.

Within this mechanism, Attentional Coherency Seeking (ACS-II) regulates the drift between factual and fictional. When the CSS remains loosely tethered to the CRT, imagination aids adaptability—enhancing foresight, empathy, and problem-solving. But when that tether weakens, the mind risks confusion, delusion, or ideological entrenchment. ACS-II thus preserves the adaptive tension between the real and the imagined, ensuring that simulation remains in service to survival and meaning.

Developmental Foundations

The emergence of the CSS in ontogeny can be observed in the developmental experiments Van Leeuwen highlights. When a child washes a teddy bear in a bathtub and declares that it is now “wet,” she demonstrates the capacity to hold two representations simultaneously: the factual knowledge that the teddy is dry and the imaginative commitment that it is soaked. Likewise, when another child first pretends that a brick is a bar of soap to wash the teddy, and later repurposes the same brick as a sandwich for the teddy to eat, we see the hallmark of mature imaginative control—the ability to flexibly shift between incompatible “as-if” frames without confusion.

These examples show that, from early life, humans learn to navigate layered representational worlds. The voluntary suspension of disbelief within pretend play becomes the training ground for managing complex cognitive attitudes later in life—ritual belief, fiction, moral imagination, and scientific modeling all rest upon the same foundation: the capacity to act as if while knowing it is not so.

Integrative Awareness: Siegel’s Bridge

If Murray’s work explains how the brain builds representations and Van Leeuwen’s explains what those representations do, Daniel Siegel’s The Developing Mind illuminates what it feels like to be that system from the inside. His insight—that “attention is the process that directs the flow of energy and information”—provides the unifying principle through which the CRT and CSS become a single self-regulating process.

Within the Dual-Process Action System, this is Attentional Coherency Seeking (ACS) itself—the dynamic balancing of energy and information between the CRT’s reality tracking and the CSS’s social simulation. When attention stabilizes on external sensory input, we experience perception; when it stabilizes on internal representations, we experience imagination or reflection. “Attention stabilizes that of which we are aware,” Siegel writes—and so awareness emerges as the felt coherence of an integrative system achieving balance.

Awareness, then, is not a fixed property but an ongoing act of integration—the continual synchronization of factual constraint and imaginative freedom. Emotion provides the system’s experiential feedback, signaling whether coherence has been maintained or lost. “Experience is biology,” Siegel reminds us, because attention itself sculpts the brain’s structure and function. In this light, the DPAS becomes not only a model of cognition but a model of experience itself: the mind learning to regulate its own energetic and informational flow.

Conclusion: The Mind as an Adaptive Dialogue

The CRT and CSS are not separate minds but two coordinated modes of a single cognitive engine. Their integration through attentional coherency gives rise to awareness—a living stream in which perception and imagination, truth and meaning, continually interpenetrate. The CRT grounds us in what is; the CSS reveals what could be. Their dynamic equilibrium enables the uniquely human capacity to not only survive within the world but to remake it through thought, story, and shared belief.

Through this continual negotiation, we experience reality as a subjective simulation refined through action. Each moment of perception and decision tests coherence between what we sense, what we expect, and what we value. Whether determining if an object is truly an apple or deciding whether to share it, every act becomes a small experiment in living truthfully within both ecological and social worlds.

To be self-interested is to maintain coherence within one’s own system; to be social is to extend that coherence into shared meaning. The Dual-Process Action System reveals cognition as an evolutionary dialogue: the CRT ensures contact with the real, the CSS ensures relevance to one another, and their ongoing negotiation—mediated by attention and awareness—gives rise to learning, morality, culture, and consciousness itself.