(Provisionality disclaimer)

An optimization channel is some sort of pathway through which optimization flows. E.g. arms and legs; speech; sum-threshold attacks; doing math and then doing weirdly complexly structured behavior, such as programming a computer in some previously incomprehensible way that does something powerful; self-modification / self-improvement; acausal bargaining.

Channel-general goal pursuit is goal pursuit that is geared up to exert optimization power through any optimization channel.

Really this is two properties:

• The telophore is structured so that it can potentially "hook itself up" to novelty (new understanding); it can learn the ropes in any domain / any idiom / any abstraction.
• The mind has the capacity to be unboundedly creative--there's no understanding that's outside the mind's long-term trajectory of novelty.

A mind could be unboundedly creative without pursuing a goal in a channel-general way.

There's some question here about whether to call non-channel-general goal pursuit "goal pursuit"; but we know for sure that such pursuit is important and approximately real, because that's most of what we see (though the situation is complicated).