Reality monitoring decision policies and the slowness of consciousness

Fleming and Michel (2025) suggest that conscious vision reflects a reality monitoring (RM) mechanism that evolved to separate planning from perception. Here, I critically examine the RM decision policy implied by the authors – a slow, winner-take-all strategy tagging only one first-order representation as ‘real’. Specifically, I explore how expectations about environmental or reality-tagging stability may mask alternative RM decision policies, with important implications for learning and the evolutionary emergence and function of consciousness.