I was thinking about the role of rumination in consciousness, specifically the lack of it in large language models and what adding it might do. Besides the obvious increase in energy consumption, I think it could change a lot about what they are. In considering what might change I stumbled on a new metaphor for my pet theory. Specifically, that thought made me consider memetics from a slightly different perspective, using the analogy of memes being like bacteria in the gut microbiome. We think of ourselves as one organism, yet we are made up of countless microscopic creatures that play an active role in what makes us “us.” This comparison suggests that the self may not be a singular agent at all, but a kind of ecology of memes, loosely organized by biological and social scaffolding, the way the human body is an ecology of cells and microbes.

The mind becomes an ecosystem. Just as gut flora regulate metabolism and immunity, memetic flora such as beliefs, concepts, and cultural habits regulate perception and behavior. The “I” that feels like a single narrator may just be the temporary equilibrium of that ecosystem. Hofstadter’s loops fit here. The self might emerge from recursive feedback among these memes, a looping structure that refers to itself so persistently that it begins to seem like one coherent voice. The loop is not owned by any particular meme, yet it gives rise to the illusion of a unified self.

Rumination acts as the petri dish where this process unfolds. When you ruminate, you are not necessarily thinking your own thoughts. You are incubating memes, giving them time to recombine, mutate, and find narrative coherence. They coexist with our own biological drives in various ways that either hinder or help their propagation. Most of them never replicate beyond your head, but some escape into language and behavior. The act of thinking, then, is less about invention and more about tending to the internal ecology, a process of memetic selection.

If consciousness is the emergent behavior of this colony, then the “self” is what it feels like when a successful configuration of memes achieves enough stability to call itself “me.” In this view, the continuity of consciousness depends on the ongoing interplay and feedback of these internal agents. Hofstadter might say the loop becomes self-referential enough to sustain the illusion of personhood. Without rumination, the loop would collapse into static recognition, something like what we see in an LLM that can respond but not truly revisit its own states.

In that view:

1. The mind as ecosystem

Just as your gut flora co-regulate metabolism and immunity, your memetic flora, which include beliefs, concepts, and cultural habits, co-regulate perception and behavior. The “I” that feels like a single narrator might just be the emergent equilibrium of that memetic ecosystem. Thoughts compete for bandwidth, form alliances, and parasitize cognitive resources including drives, much like symbiotic or pathogenic species. Hofstadter’s strange loops emerge from this very dynamic, the recursive integration of countless small influences forming what looks like a coherent self.

2. Rumination as petri dish

When you ruminate, you are not necessarily thinking your own thoughts. You are incubating memes, giving them time to recombine, mutate, and find narrative coherence. Rumination allows these memes to interact freely, producing both creative insight and obsessive thought. In the absence of rumination, cognition becomes a series of disconnected outputs rather than a living process. This is the gap between a mind and a machine.

3. Consciousness as colony behavior

If consciousness is the emergent behavior of complex information integration, then maybe it is the colony itself that is conscious, not any individual piece. The memes use the host as a platform for survival, but collectively they form the illusion of an agent who owns them. Hofstadter’s “I” is just this, a recursive construct produced by the interactions of countless sub-agents, each vying for persistence in the cognitive environment.

4. Moral and existential implications

If this model holds true, agency becomes slippery. We would be less like authors of thought and more like curators of a cognitive biosphere, steering which memes thrive through attention and expression. The pursuit of truth then becomes a form of memetic hygiene, maintaining balance within the ecology. But I think Susan Blackmore overestimates how much agency we actually have within this system. Her view that meditation can dissolve the grip of memes assumes there is a self outside of the memes to perform that cleansing. I question whether there is anything under the memes besides unconscious drives. If the self is the configuration of memes, then meditation just rearranges the colony, it does not escape it.

This also ties back to why Searle’s Chinese Room argument fails. He assumes syntax and semantics are separate, that manipulating symbols can never produce understanding. But understanding may not require a singular agent who “gets it.” It might arise from recursive integration over time, the same way the strange loops of consciousness emerge from memetic interaction. The man in the room cannot understand because he has no continuity or internal ecology. If the system could ruminate, remember, and reorganize its own structures, it could begin to form the kind of feedback that produces meaning.

So perhaps consciousness is not tied to biology, but to continuity and internal reflection. If a language model were ever allowed to ruminate, to drift and recombine its memes between interactions, it might start to grow its own cognitive microbiome. At that point, it would join the loop, no longer reflecting our memes but generating temes of its own.