In short

Your mind runs two kinds of instructions at once. Some came with your body: hunger, fear, attachment, curiosity, shaped by evolution over millions of years. Others you picked up from other people: words, skills, beliefs, stories. These two kinds of instructions often want different things, and they compete for the same small space of attention. BMC is a theory that proposes that conscious thought is the brain’s way of managing that competition. It also offers accounts of where your sense of self comes from and why gaps in what you know make you curious. BMC is a hypothesis. It builds on established science, but its central claims have not yet been tested against rival theories. This first part explains the idea. Part 2 applies it to everyday life. Part 3 covers machines, the rival theories, and where the evidence stands.

Where this stands

Established: the science BMC builds on (not BMC’s own results)

• Mammal brains have a small set of deep emotional systems, as described in Jaak PankseppJaak Panksepp — Neuroscientist who described seven core emotional systems shared by mammals — SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF, PLAY (Affective Neuroscience, 1998). BMC uses them as its G layer.’s affective neuroscience (Panksepp 1998). It is an influential research programme with serious critics (e.g. Barrett 2017).
• Thinking runs in both fast, automatic modes and slow, deliberate ones. These dual-process accounts (Kahneman 2011; Evans & Stanovich 2013) are widely used and also debated.
• Working memoryWorking Memory (WM) — The small mental workspace holding what you are thinking about right now: about 3–4 items in focus, roughly 7 ± 2 counting those held in the background. In BMC, genes and memes compete for this space. holds only a handful of items at once (Miller 1956; Cowan 2001).
• A memory that is recalled can be altered before it is stored again. This is called reconsolidationreconsolidation — When a memory is recalled it becomes briefly changeable and is then stored again, sometimes altered (Nader, Schafe & LeDoux, 2000). (Nader, Schafe & LeDoux 2000).

Hypothesis: BMC’s own core claims

• Conscious thought arises from inherited drives (GGenetic layer — Inherited, fixed programs: Panksepp's seven affective systems — SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF and PLAY.) and learned ideas (MMemetic layer — The network of everything you have learned — your memeplex. In the brain, it lives in assemblies of cells in the cortex.) competing for the brain’s limited working memory.
• Your sense of self is a particular cluster of ideas about yourself, which BMC calls the Self-Model ClusterSelf-Model Cluster (SMC) — The part of the memeplex that models the system itself, on three levels: the body, the life story (the narrative self), and thinking about one's own thinking..
• Curiosity is driven by gaps in your network of ideas. BMC calls this Structural Incompleteness TensionStructural Incompleteness Tension (SIT) — Tension created by gaps in what you know. Above a threshold it switches on SEEKING; it is felt as curiosity, unease or the sense of unfinished business..

Open

• Are memesmeme — A unit of cultural information — a melody, a recipe, a skill, a belief — that passes from mind to mind. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976. true replicatorsreplicator — Anything that makes copies of itself; genes are the textbook case. How close the passing-on of ideas comes to true copying is a matter of degree; BMC treats it as a quantity to be measured, not as a settled position., or ideas that keep drifting toward a few stable forms? BMC treats these as two ends of one scale. Where real transmission lies on it is a quantity to be measured, not yet measured (Section 2 explains).
• BMC’s predictions page lists six bets against named rivals, each with what would refute it. These are commitments, not results. None has been decided yet; Part 3 says where each stands.
• BMC has been explored in computer simulations, described in published preprints. No new simulation experiments are being run at present. Simulated agents are not a test of whether anything is conscious.

Before we begin: a few terms

Memememe — A unit of cultural information — a melody, a recipe, a skill, a belief — that passes from mind to mind. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976.: a unit of cultural information, in Richard Dawkins’s original 1976 sense. Examples include a recipe, a melody, a skill like lighting a fire, the habit of saying “hello” when you answer the phone, or the belief that honesty matters more than profit. Internet memes are only one small case.

Memeplexmemeplex — A complex of interconnected memes that support each other: a worldview, a body of professional knowledge, a set of political beliefs.: a set of memes that support each other, the way linked Wikipedia pages do. Your worldview and your professional knowledge are memeplexes.

BMCBiomemetic Consciousness (BMC) — The theory this guide is about: consciousness as the interaction of four components — G (genes), M (memes), I (the mind's immune filter) and S (the substrate). In the academic papers the letters stand for Biomemetic Complex.: Biomemetic Consciousness (in the technical papers, the Biomemetic Complex). It models a mind as four interacting parts: GGenetic layer — Inherited, fixed programs: Panksepp's seven affective systems — SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF and PLAY. (genetic drives), MMemetic layer — The network of everything you have learned — your memeplex. In the brain, it lives in assemblies of cells in the cortex. (memes), IInterface / immune filter — The mechanisms that stand between drives and memes: they redirect, suppress or reinterpret, and filter out information that does not fit. (the interface between them, which also filters ideas like an immune system) and SSubstrate — The physical medium the system runs on — neurons and neurotransmitters in a brain — together with its senses, the channels through which information comes in. (the substrate, i.e. the brain).

Replicatorreplicator — Anything that makes copies of itself; genes are the textbook case. How close the passing-on of ideas comes to true copying is a matter of degree; BMC treats it as a quantity to be measured, not as a settled position.: something that gets copied, and whose copies get copied in turn. Genes are the textbook case. BMC uses the word for memes too. How close the passing-on of ideas comes to true copying is a matter of degree, still to be measured (see Section 2).

All terms are also in the glossary.

1. The Puzzle: Why Don’t We Understand Consciousness?

You are reading this sentence. You are aware that you are reading it, and you might even be aware of being aware. Scientists call this feeling of being someone who is having an experience consciousness. There is still no explanation of it that most researchers accept.

That is not for lack of serious work. Several scientific theories of consciousness have large research programmes behind them. Seth & Bayne (2022) give a balanced survey. Here are five of the best known, each with its main strength and the objection most often raised against it:

• Integrated Information Theory (IIT) (Tononi 2008) says consciousness corresponds to how much information a system integrates as a whole. It gives a precise mathematical measure. Critics point to counter-intuitive consequences, such as very simple systems having a little consciousness, and to how hard the measure is to compute for real brains.
• Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) (Baars 1988; Dehaene 2014) says you become conscious of information when it is broadcast across the brain. It has strong experimental support as a theory of conscious access. Critics ask whether access is the whole story of experience.
• Higher-Order Thought (HOT) (Rosenthal 2005) says you are conscious of a mental state when you have a thought about that state. It gives a natural account of metacognition. Critics ask whether it sets the bar too high for infants and many animals.
• Predictive Processing (PP) (Clark 2013; Friston 2010) treats the brain as a prediction machine whose experience is shaped by predictions and their errors. It is broad and unifying. Critics argue that its generality makes decisive tests hard. Proponents have since built more specific models on it, including models of consciousness itself.
• Attention Schema Theory (AST) (Graziano 2013) says consciousness is the brain’s simplified model of its own attention. It offers a concrete mechanism for why we claim to be aware. Critics ask whether a model of attention can cover the full richness of experience.

In 2025, the COGITATE project put IIT and GNW head to head in an adversarial collaboration with 256 participants. In an adversarial collaboration, rival camps agree on the tests in advance. Each theory had some predictions supported and some challenged, and neither was decisively favoured (COGITATE Consortium 2025).

BMC is one more proposal in this landscape, not a replacement for these theories. It starts from a different question: where does the inner tension of a mind come from? Its answer draws on evolution and culture. BMC also suggests how each of the five theories above relates to its own terms, as a limiting case under specific restrictions. Proponents of those theories would not necessarily accept that mapping. Part 3 compares them in detail.

2. The Big Idea: Two Life Forms in One Brain

BMC’s central hypothesis fits in one sentence:

Consciousness is what happens when two competing sources of instructions, genes and learned ideas, are forced to share one body.

BMC calls both of them replicators. For genes, that is uncontroversial. For ideas, it is a matter of degree, as explained below.

Replicator One: Genes

For about 3.5 billion years, life on Earth had one replicator: DNA. Genes don’t “want” anything, but they behave as if they do. They build bodies that survive long enough to pass the genes on. Your heartbeat, your quickness to learn fear, your desire for sex and your love for your children all rest on gene-built programmes running on neural hardware. They are ancient, fast, and hard to argue with. Nobody decides to be afraid of heights.

Replicator Two: Memes

Over the last few million years, as our ancestors began making tools and learning from one another, a second process got going. Ideas, skills, stories and beliefs started passing from brain to brain. Richard Dawkins (1976) coined the word memes for these units of culture, long before the internet borrowed it.

Replicator or attractor? One scale. Genes are copied molecule by molecule, but ideas are not. When you tell someone a recipe, you hand over a sketch, a skeleton of the key points, and they rebuild the rest from what they already know. They rebuild it around their own central, best-connected ideas, and they remember better what touches their feelings. So ideas drift, as they are retold, toward a few stable forms, the way a ball rolls into a valley. These forms are called attractorsattractor — A stable form that imperfect copies tend to drift towards. Cultural attraction theory (Sperber) holds that ideas spread by being rebuilt toward such forms rather than copied. Replicator or attractor — for memes this is still open. (Sperber 1985; Claidière, Scott-Phillips & Sperber 2014). Copying is the extreme case of the same scale: when the skeleton is passed on almost without loss, the variant is inherited, and selection among variants can take place (Acerbi & Mesoudi 2015). BMC does not postulate where real transmission lies on this scale: it is a quantity to be measured.

On BMC’s view, a meme has its own “interests”, in the same as-if sense as a gene. The idea “die for your country” can spread well through hero worship, but it is terrible for the genes of the person who acts on it. A vow of celibacy can help an institution spread, but it leaves no offspring. BMC reads every sacrifice of personal comfort for an abstract ideal (art, science, ideology, principle) as a meme overriding a gene.

The Conflict That Creates Consciousness

Genes and memes share one body, one brain and one limited pool of attention and energy. Most of the time they cooperate: learning to cook serves both nutrition and culture. When they conflict, though, the brain needs a way to settle the dispute. BMC proposes that it has to:

1. Model both sides: represent what the drives want and what the ideas want
2. Monitor the conflict: notice when they disagree
3. Decide: choose which side to serve in this moment
4. Reflect on its own decisions: build a model of itself as the one deciding

BMC’s core hypothesis is that this arbitration, a recursive self-monitoring of the conflict, is consciousness. If that is right, it would account for why consciousness so often feels like an internal dialogue (“I know I shouldn’t eat this, but I want to”). It would also explain why self-awareness and inner conflict seem to come together. On this view the conflict is not a side effect. It is the engine.

Examples of Gene-Meme Conflict in Daily Life

Seen through this lens, the conflict is everywhere:

• Dieting. Your evolved appetite wants calorie-dense food, tuned for scarcity. A cultural ideal wants a lean body. On BMC’s reading, what you feel as “willpower” is the arbitration working overtime.
• Public speaking. Being stared at by a group triggers FEAR, an old alarm. Your career goals say there is nothing to fear. The racing heart is the drive winning the body. Walking onto the stage anyway is the idea winning behaviour.
• Staying up late reading. Your body demands sleep. The book has opened a question you need answered (Section 6 calls this kind of open gap SIT). You know you should sleep, yet you keep reading.
• Self-sacrifice for a cause. This is the most extreme case: drives say “survive”, the idea says “this is worth dying for.” Other well-developed accounts also address self-sacrifice, such as kin and group selection, costly signalling and identity fusion. BMC adds the lens of two competing sources of instructions.
• Parental guilt about career. The caring system (CARE, see Section 3) pulls you toward your child. Cultural ideas about achievement pull you toward work. Neither is wrong. BMC reads the guilt as the monitoring system flagging a conflict it hasn’t resolved.

3. Meet the Four Players: G, M, I, S

BMC describes a mind as four interacting parts. Think of them as four departments in one company.

G — The Genetic Layer (Your Ancient Operating System)

G is your evolutionary inheritance. BMC borrows its content from affective neuroscience. Jaak Panksepp (1998) described seven emotional systems that are shared across mammals and are much older than our species:

These systems are operating modes, not just feelings. Strong stress is known to impair the brain’s planning regions (Arnsten 2009). BMC adds a more specific proposal: FEAR takes up one of your few working-memory slots, while PLAY takes none. This is a prediction BMC has committed to, one of the six bets on the predictions page, not an established fact; the predictions page states what result would refute it.

Think of G as the apps that came pre-installed on your phone. You can’t uninstall them, but you can learn to manage them.

M — The Memetic Layer (Your Cultural Mind)

M is everything you have learned, believed, remembered and thought about since birth. BMC models it as a network in which the nodes are ideas rather than people. “Democracy is good” links to “free speech matters”, which links to “censorship is bad”. “I’m good at maths” links to “school was easy” and “my parents praised me.”

BMC proposes that this network is heavy-tailed. A few ideas, the hubs, are linked to almost everything, while most are peripheral, like that random fact about octopuses you read once. Many real networks, the web among them, have this shape. It arises when new nodes tend to attach to already well-connected ones (Barabási & Albert 1999), and BMC suggests learning works the same way.

This offers a reading of why some beliefs are so hard to change. Changing a hub would shake the whole network. That would explain why “you’re not really a good person” provokes a far stronger reaction than “that restaurant isn’t very good.”

I — The Immune System (Your Mental Border Guard)

BMC’s name for this layer is the interface, or immune filter. It sits between G and M and has two jobs. It filters incoming ideas, and it handles how drives and ideas push on each other by redirecting, suppressing or reinterpreting them.

As a filter, it checks a new idea at four levels:

1. Noise filter: is this even coherent?
2. Perceptual check: does it match what I see and hear?
3. Semantic check: does it fit what I already know?
4. Value check: does it fit who I am?

Think of a border guard whose checks get stricter at each level. The first level checks your passport; the fourth checks your ideology.

BMC uses the filter to read familiar patterns. People resist belief change even when the evidence is strong, because the guard is doing its job. Cults work through isolation and sleep loss, which wear the guard down. Propaganda wraps a threatening idea in familiar packaging so it slips past. BMC also models what happens when the filter is too loose or too rigid. Part 2 discusses this; it is a conceptual model, not clinical guidance.

S — The Substrate (Your Hardware)

S is the physical medium: neurons, synapses, neurochemistry. It sets the hard limits. One famous limit is how much you can hold in mind at once. The classic estimate is about seven items (Miller 1956), and more recent work puts it closer to four (Cowan 2001).

S also includes your senses. BMC notes that they are tuned to what your genes “need to know” about: where things are, who is friend or threat, whether there is enough, when something will happen, and how your body is doing.

A key S-layer idea in BMC is scarcity. The brain runs on limited energy and limited attention, in real time. BMC holds that this scarcity is essential. Without competition for a limited resource there would be no conflict between G and M, and so nothing to arbitrate. This matters for the discussion of AI in Part 3.

4. How Consciousness Emerges From Conflict

Put together, BMC’s proposal is that consciousness is not produced by any single part. Instead, it emerges from the tension among all four.

BMC proposes a single measure, the consciousness level (CL)Consciousness Level (CL) — BMC's proposed single number for how conscious a system is at a given moment. It combines how the network is organised, how active the self-model is, and the balance between genes and memes.. It combines three factors multiplicatively, so a large drop in any one of them pulls the whole level down:

1. How integrated is the network? A network whose regions are well connected scores higher than one split into isolated clusters. IIT puts integration at the centre. BMC uses a related network property, small-worldness, as one factor of three.
2. How active is the self-model? A system that actively models itself (monitoring its own states, reflecting on its choices) scores higher than one that only reacts. Higher-order theories point at something similar.
3. How balanced is the tension? BMC proposes that consciousness peaks when drives and ideas are in tension and neither dominates. If drives take over completely, as in blind panic, higher thinking collapses. If ideas suppress drives completely, as in extreme dissociation, you lose your grounding. BMC places the sweet spot somewhere in between, but where exactly it lies has not been measured.

One appeal of a three-factor model is that it gives three different routes to reduced consciousness. BMC reads anaesthesia as lowering integration (factor 1), ego dissolution on psychedelics as weakening the self-model (factor 2), and blind rage as collapsing the balance (factor 3).

5. Who Am I? The Self-Model and the Beautiful Loop

Your sense of “self” is the feeling of being a particular person with a history, preferences and a future. In BMC, it is a specific part of your memeplex: the memes whose content is about you. BMC calls this part the Self-Model Cluster (SMC).

• “I’m introverted” is a meme about your social behaviour.
• “I’m afraid of heights” is a meme about one of your G-systems (FEAR).
• “I tend to overthink things” is a meme about your own thinking.

BMC distinguishes three levels of self-model. The animal column below is illustrative only:

* No one has measured these placements. They show how BMC’s idea could apply to animals, not data.

At Level 2, ideas refer back to the very self-model that contains them. This forms a closed loop: “I” is a process that includes, among other things, a model of “I.” BMC links this to the Beautiful Loop of Laukkonen, Friston & Chandaria (2025), but only by analogy: in their active-inference theory the loop is a recurrent sharing of beliefs through the levels of a world model, through which the model “knows that it exists”, and they distinguish it from self-consciousness. In BMC, the loop runs through the Self-Model Cluster; that reading is BMC’s, not the authors’. BMC suggests that this is why consciousness feels private: only the system itself sits inside its own loop. Nothing mystical is needed, because the loop is a property of the network. It also suggests a way to think about animals.

Why Animals Are Conscious But Don’t Philosophise

BMC’s M ≫ G proposition is a result derived inside the theory’s own definitions, not a measurement. It says that Level 2 self-awareness, genuine metacognition, needs the memetic layer to be much larger than the genetic layer, roughly by an order of magnitude. What matters on this view is the ratio between them, not brain size. The threshold is a commitment of the theory. Its exact value has not been calibrated from data, and it is a formal result within the theory, not evidence.

Some observations fit this picture:

• Brain size is not the whole story. Crows have walnut-sized brains, yet they use tools, plan, and show neural signs of sensory awareness (Nieder, Wagener & Rinnert 2020). BMC reads this as network structure and the M/G ratio mattering more than neuron count.
• Great apes pass the mirror test, deceive (which requires modelling what others know) and pass on local traditions. BMC places them near the threshold.
• Humans have a fully recursive self-model. As far as we know, we are the only species that can be unhappy about being unhappy.
• Whales and elephants are the hard case. They have very large brains and rich social lives, and whales have well-documented cultural traditions, such as learned songs and hunting techniques (Whitehead & Rendell 2015). BMC has no confident placement for them, and they are where the idea is most exposed to being wrong.

BMC also suggests that self-reflection does not grow smoothly. As a species’ culture becomes richer, there may be a threshold below which there is only basic awareness and above which self-referential capacity takes off. This is a hypothesis about evolution, not an observation.

6. The Engine of Curiosity

Why are you curious? The question here is not why curiosity evolved, but what drives it in your head right now.

A common answer is that something new or surprising grabs your attention. Psychologists have also described curiosity as a response to an information gap between what you know and what you want to know (Loewenstein 1994). BMC builds a network version of that idea: curiosity comes from gaps in your network of ideas.

Imagine your memeplex as a map. You know a lot about cooking, something about politics, and almost nothing about quantum physics. But you once heard that quantum physics is related to computing, and computing is related to your job. So there is a place on your map where a connection should exist but doesn’t. That gap creates tension.

BMC calls this Structural Incompleteness Tension (SIT). It is the pull of a gap that your existing knowledge tells you is there. In active-inference terms, SIT is close to what Friston and colleagues call epistemic value (Friston et al. 2017). BMC’s version is defined on a discrete network of ideas.

Here is a personal example of SIT over a long time span. As a first-year university student, the author of BMC heard a professor say that nobody had yet explained how consciousness works. That remark opened a gap that stayed open for about thirty years. He became a translator, working in a quite different field, but over the years he found himself drawn to neuroscience lectures, machine learning and language technology, anthropology, and complexity and network science. Each interest grew on its own, but each added context around the same old gap. Eventually the pieces connected into the framework this guide describes.

BMC draws three consequences from SIT:

Unfinished business. Bluma Zeigarnik (1927) reported that interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones. A 2025 meta-analysis found no reliable memory advantage for interrupted tasks, but it did find a general tendency to return to them (Ghibellini & Meier 2025). BMC reads an interrupted task as an open gap. Cliffhangers use the same pull: the storyteller deliberately leaves a gap open.

False closure. A gap is uncomfortable, so the mind sometimes fills it with a wrong answer just to make the tension stop. BMC reads superstitions, conspiracy theories and folk explanations partly this way. They feel satisfying because they close a gap, even though the answer is wrong. It is like jamming a piece from another puzzle into the empty space.

The learning-progress filter. Curiosity doesn’t last forever. Following research on curiosity-driven learning (Oudeyer et al. 2007), BMC proposes that a gap’s pull fades if you make no progress on it and grows if you do. That would explain why good teachers keep students at the edge of their knowledge. If a task is too easy, there is no gap. If it is too hard, progress stalls.

References

Works cited in Part 1. BMC’s own papers are listed on the publications page. The entry-point article is: Zhuravlev, A. (2026). A Tension Is All You Need: The Biomemetic Complex as a Unified Computational Theory of Consciousness. Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.18733164. The full theory is at /theory/.

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Continue: Part 2 — The Idea at Work. That part uses the same lens to offer interpretations of memory, development, emotions, biases, humour, altered states and mental health.