Consciousness Originated from Value Conflict: The Evolutionary Strategy of Global Information Mobilization

The "hard problem" of consciousness has long plagued philosophy and cognitive science: why do physical processes accompany subjective experience? Existing mainstream theories—such as Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Global Workspace Theory (GWT), and the Predictive Coding framework—focus primarily on describing the "structure" or "mechanism" of consciousness, yet fail to adequately explain why consciousness "exists" at all. A deeper dilemma lies in the fact that these theories often reverse-engineer the essence of consciousness from functional outcomes such as "selection capacity" or "information processing complexity," leading to increasingly blurred boundaries of consciousness. The recently proposed "Abstraction Fallacy" critique correctly points out that symbol-based artificial intelligence cannot instantiate consciousness; however, by narrowly equating "computation" with observer-dependent symbolic operations, it overlooks the normative computation that is innately present in biological systems. This paper proposes a phylogenetic perspective: consciousness is not an inherent property of the nervous system, but rather an evolutionary strategy of global information active mobilization that emerges when core value conflicts cause normative computation to fail, forcing the system to restore behavioral determinacy. Normative computation exists innately in living systems (from protein folding to chemical gradient tropisms), and accumulates as multiple normative computations as the nervous system becomes more complex; when incommensurable value dimensions render normative computation ineffective and the system falls into a certainty vacuum, global mobilization is forced to initiate, and consciousness thereby emerges. Current artificial intelligence systems, despite possessing extremely high multiple normative computation capabilities, never face normative computation failure due to the lack of existential value calibration—this conversely proves that the critical variable of consciousness is not computational complexity, but the motivational structure of conflict resolution. This paper attempts to provide an explanatory path for consciousness research that shifts from "reverse-engineering from function" to "phylogenetic/existential" approaches.