I suspect any mechanistic understanding of consciousness will frame the phenomenon as a palimpsest of sensory phenomena and “lessons” abstracted therefrom, IE connectomic circuits, informed by sensory input, that entail the execution of certain biochemical functions, which then exert influence, statistically, on the likelihood of reproduction.
Beyond reproduction, I think other human motivations are, as far as negentropy is concerned, spandrels. That said, as far as we are concerned, our interests needn’t be reduced down to ensuring reproduction, as there are ostensibly much more oblique and nebulous motivations at play - motivations which perhaps quintessentially defy analytic reduction.