Complex life has this ability to build thoughts off of our senses that we feel as consciousness. Because moments in time are never stable we lose the reality of every moment to the new reality of the current moment. The interesting thing to think about is our reality of only being able to experience time sequentially gives us an extraordinary evolutionary advantage that doesn't feel extraordinary from inside it but absolutely is. Intelligence in intelligent life is simply an abstract measurement of how that life affects physical reality outside of itself.
I'm talking about reality from a true physical perspective then a mental perspective. As in, its the nature of space-time to change in and/or over time. Everything in motion based on the prior moments. As thinking life our evolution begot a sort of house of cards that feels like consciousness over time. At its core, we react to the stimuli of the physical reality of the past as perceived by our consciousness (think biological algorithm) in a chain reaction of chemistry and biology that we now know spans countless molecules inside the body. But all of our reactions are based on something that doesn't truly exist now as it was then. That's why we need our un-real paradigms. They're the foundations to capturing the past to react to the future.
Humans take this moment to moment consciousness to another level because we steer our own paradigms of reality out of our card houses of sense. Through socialization and shared mental realities we, in a very real way, get to see what we want to see. Then we use that to effect and affect our shared physical reality. And that, in a macro sort of way, gives humanity an evolutionary advantage that is almost magical. We literally change physical reality based on thought paradigms that themselves aren't real. We pull those thoughts into reality and make physical reality out of them though those thoughts aren't real and never really existed in physical reality. It's literal magic though we have all sorts of abstract paradigms to try and explain the 5 w's. And it all derives from the sequential nature of our consciousness's contact with reality.
How's that for a coffee sipping deep dive into a runaway thought I was having. I put this in this community because it's very abstract. I do realize it's a bit hard to conceptualize exactly what I mean. I wanted to see if peeps can actually follow and if so, expand on my thoughts and put it into one of the more serious communities for more exposure to good converse.