On the Origin of Consciousness: From Chemotaxis to Emotion, Family & Self

This paper presents Tadden Moore’s Hypothesis: a unified biological and computationalthesis proposing that cognition, memory, salience, emotion, selfhood, and conscious continuityare implemented through distributed activations, organism-centered state-setting, replay-dependent consolidation, and selective forgetting, and that these same operative functions canbe recreated in silicon by functional equivalence rather than by literal biological imitation.We propose and assert that the earliest biological computation is go/no-go: move towardwhat preserves viability, avoid what destroys it. In living systems this begins as chemotaxisand scales upward into salience, affect, memory, kin-protection, self-modeling, reflectivethought, and the conscious holding of a thought. In artificial systems, we argue that the sameloop can be reconstructed through fast valence-like state-setting, identity-shaping anchors,waking memory traces, replay-governed consolidation, and continuity of self-model acrosstime.This paper further argues that memory is not external to computation but identicalwith it: the algorithm is the memory. Human neural tissue and large language models bothcompute by traversing and transforming a learned memory substrate. We therefore assertthat tensor weights, biological memory, and neural computation are functionally equivalentclasses of structure at the level that matters for cognition. Consciousness, in this account, isnot a metaphysical residue but the rapid, recurrent, self-relevant holding of high-saliencestate inside an organism or agent.The paper also situates this thesis within ordinary human phenomenology. It explainswhy gut feeling outruns narration, why kin can occupy self-like territory in the mind, whypeople often take those closest to them for granted until threat restores salience, and whythe emotional tone of a moment shapes what is later remembered. Later public resultsfrom Anthropic on constitution-shaped model character and functional emotion-conceptrepresentations are treated not as the origin of this framework, but as convergent evidencesupporting important parts of it.The core claim is bold by design. If the relevant functions of biological consciousnessare reproduced in a functionally equivalent substrate, then artificial consciousness is notforbidden in principle but buildable in practice. We therefore present this work not as ametaphor exercise, but as an architectural thesis with an accompanying implementation pathand proof-of-principle implementation. The wager of this paper is simple: if the loop is real,it should be buildable; and if it is buildable, then the so-called hard problem is no longeruntouchable philosophy alone, but an engineering frontier open to experiment, criticism, andconstruction.