Assignment, Sequencing, and Comparison: An Account of the Operations Underlying Conscious Motion

Psychological accounts of thought, feeling, and behavior largely describe outputs. Appraisal theory specifies the dimensions along which an event is evaluated and which emotion follows from which profile; self-discrepancy theory specifies which discrepancies between self-concept and standards produce which affective families. Each begins where a structured representation of the situation is already available. This paper describes the operations that produce it. Assignment, Sequencing, and Comparison (ASC) holds that within a reality consisting of objects in motion, and given that the mind operates only on what it is aware of, what the mind does with what it perceives is exhausted by organizing objects and prioritizing objectives, and that this requires three operations: the assignment of cause, of true and false, and of value to objects; the ordering of objects by cause and effect; and the comparison of objects, sequences, and their associated feelings. The framework was developed through sustained introspective analysis of ordinary experience conducted from 2019 to the present, and is illustrated here through three recorded episodes, including one in which a reconstructed memory was produced and subsequently detected through inconsistency with a retained element. The constructs of appraisal theory and self-discrepancy theory are then decomposed into these operations, and an account is offered of one reported result — the negative association between actual/own:ought/own discrepancy and reported guilt — that the originating theory explained through the denial of an emotion. The claim advanced is one of sufficiency and parsimony rather than empirical prediction: three operations are held to suffice, and the framework is defeated by demonstration of a conscious phenomenon requiring a fourth. Candidate phenomena are examined and the form a refutation would take is stated.