In an era when debates on consciousness, artificial general intelligence, and the nature of life remain fragmented across neuroscience, philosophy, and computer science, one recent monograph offers a strikingly unified alternative. Circuitry of the Individual Adaptive System (fornit.ru/71228) presents a fully algorithmic, substrate-independent model of living entities that begins with cellular homeostasis and scales without discontinuity to consciousness, intuition, and creativity. Rejecting both quantum hypotheses and the “hard problem” as misframed, the work grounds all phenomena in a single causal architecture—the Egostat—whose core imperative is the ego-centric maintenance of life-critical parameters (Vitals). The model is not merely descriptive; it has been partially instantiated in open-source software prototypes (the Beast and Isida projects), demonstrating that consciousness emerges as an adaptive process rather than a metaphysical add-on. This article reviews the central tenets of the theory, its terminological innovations, the hierarchical progression from reflexes to voluntary awareness, and its direct implications for engineering strong AI. Particular attention is paid to the functional definitions that eliminate longstanding ambiguities in psychology and biology, and to the verification methodology that treats the entire system as an executable specification rather than a collection of isolated empirical claims.