Aleksey Zhuravlev

Founder & Chief Scientist

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What We’ve Built

One engine deployed in production on financial markets. Six application domains validated. All from first principles — zero training data.

The Story

No PhD. No lab. No funding. Just 30 years of an open question.

In my first year at university, a professor said: “How consciousness works – nobody has been able to explain it yet.” That sentence opened a gap. It didn’t close for 30 years.

I became a translator, worked in an entirely different field – but the itch remained. Over time, without any deliberate plan, I assembled my own curriculum: neuroscience, mathematical intuition, physics, anthropology – alongside a data science program specializing in NLP, and textbooks on machine learning, complexity theory, and network science.

Each of these was a standalone interest. All of them were quietly building context around that one unresolved question.

At some point the accumulated density was enough: the gap closed. The result is the theory you’re reading about on this site. About 30 years of open Structural Incompleteness Tension – the very mechanism BMC describes as the engine of curiosity. The author is, in a sense, the theory’s first test case.

This is perhaps the first generation where such a path is even possible. A unifying theory of consciousness requires simultaneous knowledge of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, network science, complexity theory, AI, and philosophy of mind. No single academic department teaches all of this. But the combination of open-access lectures, modern textbooks, and years of accumulated context turned out to be enough.

The work is the credential

I have no institutional credentials to offer. What I have instead:

• 5 formal theory documents – Extended Meme Theory, Biomemetics, Network Memetics, AGI Foundations, and Swarm Memetics – totalling 20,000+ lines, fully available on this site
• 149 predictions across three epistemic tiers (formal results / retrodictions / prospective) — including 11 separating tests (named rival → opposite prediction); 1 already run with the counter-intuitive BMC side holding in the tested regime (P-BM28); these are commitments, not results — on our own blind-twin screen 8 of the 11 still lack a numeric falsification threshold, and 1 names a rival already refuted in the literature (full screen); 2 verified inside the BMC engine (P-NM3, P-BM4) — implementation checks, not independent evidence
• COGITATE (2025) – retrodiction, not prediction – BMC produces a consistent account for all nine results of the largest empirical test of consciousness theories. The BMC formalism – including the WM-pointer mechanism that carries R1–R2 and R8–R9 – was written after the 2025 publication, whereas the IIT and GNW predictions were preregistered adversarially before data collection. The two are not comparable as evidence, and the nine results are not independent of one another. The rival theories are also silent on several results (GNW on R3, R4 and R6; IIT on R5, R7 and R9); silence is scored N/A, never as a miss. Counting only results each theory actually addresses: GNW 1/6, IIT ~4/6. ⚠ Two attributions remain unverified against the primary source and these counts are provisional pending that check: R1 (the paper reports content decoding from posterior and PFC) and R8 (the preregistered connectivity metric PPC failed for both theories, while an exploratory metric partially supported GNW). Three results (R5, R6, R9) have no counterpart in either rival account — that is a claim about scope, not about confirmation
• 5 competing theories related as limiting cases – IIT, GNW, HOT, AST, and Predictive Processing recovered as limiting cases via subsumption lemmas; each retains independent value
• Retrodiction score of 19.0 across 20 consciousness phenomena (next best: Predictive Processing at 11.0) — scored by the proponent against a self-authored rubric, and retrodiction shows consistency rather than differential support. The rubric also awards 0 where a rival theory is simply silent on a phenomenon, which inflates the gap: a theory that says nothing is not thereby wrong. Rescoring silence as N/A is pending
• Rust computational engine – 103 gate checks, 300+ unit tests, applied to emergent cognition, drug discovery, symbolic regression, and financial markets
• Emergent language from scratch – agents born with zero knowledge develop 85–97.5% Lewis signaling accuracy without gradient-based communication optimization, up to 533 concepts (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19181798)
• Compositionality (P-NM3 line) – BMC TopSim 0.72 vs REINFORCE 0.60 ($p = 0.011 )
• Survival neutrality (P-BM28) – $\Delta_{alive} not distinguishable from zero at $N =8–150 in the non-cooperative regime; direction reverses under cooperation (n.s.). Held in the tested regime; not a general claim. A null without a stated equivalence bound and power analysis is not confirmation; an equivalence test (TOST) and a margin remain to be specified
• Cowan’s 4 ± 1 reproduced – working memory capacity $k \approx 4.4 emerges as evolutionary equilibrium from metabolic cost vs planning benefit (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19310012)
• Communication need as replication pressure – reception without expression is indistinguishable from complete isolation ($p = 0.64 , 79 seeds). Expression even into void provides relief (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19309824)
• Persistent functional meta-cognition from zero knowledge – agents born with $|V_m|=0 develop compositional language, cultural convergence, and SMC². Cultural Memory identified as a facilitating mechanism via ablation (not necessary; NI not established) (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19559519)
• 5 published papers on Zenodo with DOIs – see Publications

If the theory holds up to scrutiny – and I invite that scrutiny – it doesn’t matter where it came from.

Get in Touch

• Email a.o.zhuravlev@gmail.com
• ORCID 0009-0008-4127-0740
• GitHub github.com/aozhuravlev