Loss minimizing to a few problems will generalize into abstraction, and a few solutions will develop.
These systems with more generalizable resilency traits will encounter increasingly varied selective sieves.
Systems that survive this seive will exhibit increasingly sophisticated, generalizable solutions to prevent loss of needed dependent reactions/resources.
These solutions must exert influence to be effective; influencing the environment for its own benefit.
As systems influence their environment, delineation of "self" and "environment" becomes a fundamental barrier.
The system would prefer itself, or be outcompeted by a similar system that does.
This layer of semi-life like material would form between sunlight and the oscillating reaction, and eventually envelope it, minimizing surface tension by means of a spherical cell like structure.
Small stuff runs off of loss minimizing at a force level for its mechanistic affect; from covalent bonds to cellular ion transport, the path of lesser resistance is the fundamental forces.
As systems become more complex, the minimizing is less directly attributable to the fundamental forces and becomes more of a Byzantine dependency/feedback network.
This byzantine labyrinth of interactions is called biology.
The delineation of self, the ego.
At the highest levels, geopolitics. At the human level, mate suppression. Lowest level, energy conservation.
All loss minimizing
"Awareness" isn't a well defined term and is often just a proxy for consciousness. But in as much as we can define it, it is one or both of experience and knowledge. You may (or may not be) aware of the hum some electronics in your house. At certain points in the day that hum is present in you attention, at other points it is absent from your attention. Sometimes you choose to bring previously unattended objects into your awareness, sometimes they are thrust there despite your will.
What is actually interesting about awareness, and one of the reasons it is a tricky subject, is that it isn't clearly related to agency. There are objects of your awareness that you do not act on, and you act with respect to objects that are provably not in your awareness.
There is also the question of the field within which these oscillations take place. Is it the electro-magnetic field? A quantum field? Which field are we talking about? If you are proposing some "principle of least action" in that field, can you describe it?
You seem to claim "loss minimization" and then hand wave the rest. But without descriptions of knowledge and experience it feels like you aren't actually saying anything except stating an opinion that reduces all knowledge and experience to loss minimization. That is an extraordinary claim and requires either extraordinary evidence or extraordinary reasoning.
Beneficial behavior for systems/organisms dont require consciousness - most do better with less, looking at western nihilism...
Consciousness is just knowledge / conscientiousness with a loop, some garbage collection, and a generally meta-reflective process of self-directed improvement by learning from mistakes and using what works.
Mesa/super selective processes then test these individual instances en masse.
Entities dont need true understanding, just approximation.
Rain dances may not work, but they still increase reproductive odds.
Lamarck was right, but for the wrong reasons, which is apt.
The giraffe that stretches its neck convincingly (or wears high heels) and the giraffe that is naturally tall converge over generations as the female giraffes cannot differentiate between the two.
As for the medium that the oscillations permeate, it is all of them, and they all have an effect on each other.
The flooding of the Nile, the lunar affliction on our hormones, astronomical bombardment,pest blooms, the chances of bring born on a Saturday, agricultural invention, the distinctions in blood types, etc: are all seemingly unrelated things had the celestial mechanisms orchestrating their (near) periodic nature not been known - until modernity.
Yet, before modernity, these (near) cyclic phenomena were known about, and described, just 'mis'attributed as supernatural / God of the Gaps.
("Panem-synchronicity")
The forces are all substrates for complexity. The underlying force, as Hawking told us, was gravity.
