Cognitive Delegation and Personality Concentration in Optimized Minds

We propose a theory—Cognitive Delegation & Personality Concentration (CDPC)—that formalizes and integrates the intuition that as brains become highly optimized for recurrent tasks, lower-level cognitive control is increasingly delegated to unconscious (automatic) mechanisms while conscious, self-related processes increasingly concentrate responsibility for values, narrative identity, and long-range coherence (what we call “personality control”). We ground the account in predictive-processing / free-energy principles and dual-process frameworks, and give an explicit two-tier formalization distinguishing local free-energy minimization (task-level, unconscious) from global model-coherence maintenance (personality-level, conscious). The model yields precise, testable predictions across behavior, neurophysiology, clinical phenomena, pharmacology, and artificial systems. We outline experimental paradigms (expertise, perturbation, pharmacological manipulation, neuroimaging, longitudinal training), computational instantiations, and possible routes to falsification. The aim is a professional, falsifiable, and useful theory that preserves the central role of personality and high-level meaning while explaining why cognitive processes become unconscious with optimization. Keywords: predictive processing, free-energy principle, dual-process, consciousness, personality, expertise, automaticity, self-model, global coherence