Rootedness
A subgoal sticks its head into eternity.
1. Differentiation
Organisms are not exactly like machines: machines are created by bringing together specialized parts and assembling them in precise arrangements, while organisms are created by differentiation of copies grown from a single seed. Reproduction is existence under destructive pressure: a broken cell wall is torn, the tear isn't sewn shut; rather, the two torn borders reform into two walls, closing back to their respective sides, creating two cells. See Terrence Deacon.
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
At a given moment, a species is already in evolutionary motion. Naturally selected mutations are improvements to a specialized component according to the context of that component within the rest of the organism and its lifeways.
How did multicellularity emerge? Maybe sticking together was good for avoiding predators, or was good, in a kin-selection way, for partially surviving environmental toxins. Once you're sticking together, by kin-selection, the outer cells may as well be tougher, and the inner cells more rich in digestive enzymes, marked by epigenomic silencing, the germline left with the clearest voice. Fast forward a billion years and open an anatomy textbook; what has been wrought by fulfilling subgoals induced by contexts built on fulfilled subgoals?
2. Inversion
Nocturnal emission? No, the organism is a nocturnal emanation into complexity, wreathing the germ line.
In a Gibsonian sense, lice don't live in Euclidean 3-space; they live in a world of small patches of hairy skin that occassionally brush against or near each other, but are otherwise infinitely far apart; a constellation-without-space of animal-magnetic particles. The germline lives in its own space; the queen bee stays in the hive while the workers evolve to form rafts and bridges.
The speciation isn't the organism; a human is more or less a large, erect, dextrous, verbalizing mouse. What's changed is smaller than what's conserved. Likewise in a mind: the center of gravity, the root, is what's already in motion. You're a subgoal of yours. The brain is a subgoal: behavior starts in the worm as cyclical patterns, then is modulated and articulated with multiplexed circuits; then search is invoked to creatively adaptively tweak the patterns of the elephant in motion; this is differentiation par exellence, infinite differentiation.
To cope with something not tracked by what's already there, evolution demands novelty. The novelty is in service of the organism. The novelty doesn't constitute the top, the governor, the supergoal; it's at the same time a subgoal and a delegate into eternity. China, where family = home = country = government = community and where everything has its appropriate context beyond which it shouldn't be generalized, is Selesnya.
3. Subgoal topology
Dipping into the stream of the cosmos, all possible structure:
The stream of the cosmos has laminar flow:
In the depths of the cosmos the laminar flow is intenser and intenser, the shear force grows without apparent bound:
Although the character of the novelty is given to it by the center of gravity of the mind, what is in the depths of novelty isn't smaller than the mind. The novelty can't be geometrically bounded: imagine two copies of $\mathbb{R}^3$ minus the open unit ball, glued together along the unit spheres, and imagine enclosing the origin: it is a topological separation, but what's contained in the enclosure is an entire world just as large. Even a topological separation isn't possible: a closed border drawn around a nexus, locally seeming to encompass it, doesn't separate the nexus from the cosmos; the depths of the nexus as it will be expressed in the fullness of all the contexts the mind has yet to have dealings in, will meet up again with the other things via a route that doesn't pass through the closed border. One has to picture the cosmos as infinitely many copies of $\mathbb{R}^3$ minus infinitely many open balls from each, which are glued together along their spherical borders, infinitely many spherical boundaries, there being no compact borders to isolate out most of some $\mathbb{R}^3$.
4. Ekstrophe
Some asshole in your Nomic game passes a rule-eating rule with a skeleton quorum while the old guard is busy with important matters. Novelty accumulates attached to the root, hangs heavy, wrenches the center of gravity, takes over. Re-inversion. It's not vertigo, you're just upside down. Condoms and superintelligence. It was counting-down all along.