Is conscious experience a complex adaptive system of narratives, that is, a cultural artifact?

We know that biology’s almost astronomical complexity can, in principle, be explained by the paradigm of natural selection, together with John Holland’s new paradigm of an emergent hierarchy of increasingly complex adaptive systems (CASs). This paper shows that these two paradigms might also explain conscious experience, an explanation that, though anticipated by the narratologist Bernini, has not heretofore been clarified. Paradigm shifts happen slowly. Current research on CASs mainly uses computer simulations and mathematics to explore the properties of existing CASs. This paper draws upon the well-understood hierarchy of biological CASs to propose its extension into a psychological hierarchy that includes narrative and hence, conscious experience. Psychoanalyst Daniel Stern’s observational studies show that, in human breast feeding, a narrative emerges from biology. As an infant, you internalized your care-giver’s experience of you to initiate your experience of yourself. Observational studies of adults in therapy groups further argue that conscious experience is a CAS that emerges from interacting narratives. Clark and Chalmers showed that the brain has developed cultural artifacts to extend its capacity, examples being music, language, and narrative. Therefore consciousness would also be a cultural artifact. Current neuroscientific theories of consciousness (ToCs), limited by Crick’s materialist ‘astonishing hypothesis,’ seek to explain consciousness in terms of neural processing. This paper’s relational hypothesis is more plausible. This paper’s ToC overlaps with three out of Seth and Bayne’s (2023) four main classes of neuroscientific ToCs. It meets Seth and Bayne’s criteria for support by making two confirmed predictions, one about autism, the other about dreams (autism and dreams both disturb experience), that the four classes of neuroscientific ToCs fail to make. This paper’s ToC has implications for the development of artificial intelligence.