The difficulty of explaining what consciousness is dissipates when we consider its evolution. A monist, perceptual account of consciousness helpfully provides a wealth of resources to understand human experience. In this talk, I suggest sentience evolved to track inner (affective) and outer (sensory) states of the organism and that therefore human consciousness is constituted by agency and memory. Memory maintains, integrates, and projects the body through time. This series of states develops as constraints, learning, and explicit memory. By emphasizing the richness of perception, we can comprehend how consciousness evolved into a medium for the agentive and felt nature of emotions, associations, and imagination. The thickness of human experience is thus enacted by how memory systems frame perception and imagination. This monist model of consciousness is the context for the social nature of the Self.