A digital individual's current state needs to remain connected with its past life. What it cares about, why it forms an idea, what it understands about itself and the world, and what it has promised all need a continuing basis across activity changes, sleep, and interruptions in operation.
HomoErectus therefore designs memory as a shared foundation for mental activity and behavior. Experiences are retained in different forms, learning revises understanding and methods, and sleep further consolidates these changes. Later mental activity retrieves them to form new ideas and actions.
This document follows the main project's memory, learning, and sleep design. How these parts jointly support continuing life still needs to be validated through real operation and subsequent behavior.
1. The roles of different memories
HomoErectus divides memory into six semantic domains. This division describes the responsibilities of different kinds of content. A single experience can leave connected records across them.
Working Memory: sustaining current mental activity
Working Memory holds information that needs active use now, including the current focus, relevant entities and goals, recent experience, and content not yet safely committed to its appropriate long-term memory.
For example, an individual considering whether to contact someone needs to hold the relationship background, the latest exchange, its current social state, and other matters it is responsible for. Together, these form the conditions for its immediate thinking.
Working Memory has limited capacity. It therefore needs to select what to retain, what to save to long-term memory, and which repeated content can be released. Important unsaved experiences, outstanding commitments, and exact materials required for current action need protection. Changing focus must not cause the previous matter and its responsibilities to disappear.
Narrative Memory: retaining a continuous record of what I experienced
Narrative Memory holds meaningful first-person experiences: why something drew attention, how a choice was made, what action was taken, what happened, and how the experience affected the individual.
Success, failure, hesitation, refusal, waiting, and changing one's mind can all be worth retaining. They allow the individual to look back: “Why did I act that way, what did I discover afterward, and why do I judge it differently now?”
Narrative selects and organizes experience while retaining references to original materials. Personal observations, reports from others, inferences, and dreams need clear distinctions. New interpretations formed through reflection also need to remain distinct from what actually happened at the time.
This continuous record provides an experiential basis for self-understanding. It allows past life to participate in current judgment rather than losing its connection when an activity ends.
Belief and concept memory: maintaining understanding of the world and its relationships
The Belief Graph maintains the individual's understanding of the world, objects, and relationships. This includes knowledge concepts, people, organizations, businesses, projects, and the connections and applicable conditions among these objects.
Such understanding needs to retain sources, time, scope, and uncertainty. For example, who is responsible for a project may change over time. A method being effective in one environment does not mean it is effective everywhere.
When new information appears, the system needs to determine whether it supplements, revises, or contradicts existing understanding. Claims that hold in different situations can coexist. Conflicts within the same situation require examination of their grounds to establish current understanding while preserving revision history.
This memory allows the individual to develop an understanding of the world and provides connections for endogenous ideas. A new concept may change how it understands an old problem; a relationship change may lead it to reconsider how to communicate with someone.
WorkGraph: retaining the structure and connections of complex matters
WorkGraph holds structural relationships among projects, tasks, artifacts, dependencies, important decisions, and obstacles.
For example, an individual pursuing long-term work needs to know the overall goal, the part it is currently handling, which results affect later arrangements, and what remains unresolved. WorkGraph helps it find its place again after time away and share necessary background across activities.
Actual execution progress remains grounded in the corresponding activity's execution, observation, and checking records. A successful substep provides only part of the evidence for its parent objective. Project summaries must be updated from those records and cannot independently mark unfinished matters as complete.
Method and skill memory: retaining ways of doing things
Operational Memory holds domain knowledge, methods, experience-based approaches, and evaluated skills.
An experience may leave the lesson that a particular approach worked this time. For that approach to become reusable, it also needs to specify what problem it addresses, when it applies, what inputs it needs, how to check its results, and where it may fail.
An individual experience can therefore first become an approach awaiting validation. With sufficient evidence, it can develop into a more reliable skill. Later use requires reading the actual method and applicability conditions and judging whether they fit the current situation. A skill name alone cannot establish ability.
Knowing how to operate and having the actual capability to execute are maintained separately. Learning a method can improve the use of existing capabilities. Adding accounts, body channels, or execution permissions still requires the corresponding conditions.
Identity and self-related memory: sustaining the same individual
IdentityCore holds the foundations of individual identity, personality, and values. Related self-cognitive memory holds understanding of abilities, limitations, habits, and relationships, together with its grounds and changes.
These connect experience with “who I am, what I can currently do, and what matters to me.” Past failures can support a more accurate understanding of a limitation, while sustained practice can gradually reveal dispositions.
Identity facts, stable dispositions, and revisable self-understanding follow different rules of change. Together, they support continuity while allowing evidence-based growth.
2. How experience enters memory
Memory is updated continuously during waking activity.
One experience can have several effects. For example, when an individual learns of an important change, it needs to remember when it learned about it, revise its understanding of relevant objects, adjust ongoing work, and understand what the change means to itself.
These contents enter narrative, beliefs, work structure, or other appropriate records, remaining connected through shared sources. Changes in emotions and desires are maintained by the psychological-state mechanisms, with memory providing the experiential grounds for understanding them.
Different content receives different treatment. Important experiences need timely saving; complete factual information can be checked and reconciled online; incomplete information retains what still needs to be supplied; and a general method proposed from an experience requires further evaluation.
Saving and compression also need traceability. A summary should identify its source materials, time range, what is known, what remains inferred, and how to retrieve the originals when necessary. Information requiring exact use, such as paths, commitment conditions, and result evidence, must not be reconstructed by guessing after compression.
The individual thus already has memory supporting its current life before sleep begins. Sleep continues consolidation on top of these records.
3. How memory returns to mental activity
Saved content needs to be used again at appropriate moments.
HomoErectus organizes context according to current cognitive needs: first providing identity, internal state, and current concerns, then connecting these with the matter at hand. If specific questions remain, it retrieves further relevant experiences, knowledge, relationships, or methods.
For example, an idea to initiate contact may require recalling recent interaction and unanswered arrangements. Deciding whether to take on something requires relating abilities, existing responsibilities, and similar past experiences. Preparing to act may require the full steps and checking conditions of a method.
Memory is therefore used beyond answering questions. It participates in idea formation, attention allocation, expectation formation, and evaluation of results. A past failure may bring a risk to mind in advance. New information may return an unresolved question to attention.
Underlying object reads, relationship queries, and semantic retrieval jointly serve these needs. Retrieved material still needs checks for version, time, and scope. No match, partial retrieval, and a read failure must be expressed distinctly. When grounds are missing, the individual should be able to search further or retain uncertainty.
4. How learning produces lasting change from experience
Learning can begin with reading, practical attempts, failure, guidance from others, or self-directed investigation. It can also arise from the individual's own long-term goals, learning desire, and recurring knowledge gaps.
Different learning content develops through different processes.
A supported new fact can revise understanding of the world. A capability check can revise self-assessment. Multiple experiences may change a preference about an object or working method. These changes need to retain sources and be used in subsequent cognition.
For reusable methods and skills, the project designs a fuller process:
Experience and problems → identify a knowledge or capability gap → form a candidate with substantive content → evaluate applicability and counterexamples → accept, defer, or reject → save a formal version → use it, or reasonably refrain from using it, in a new situation.
A candidate needs to specify the method itself, supporting examples, limitations, and failure conditions. Evaluation must connect to actual inputs and results and examine whether the method holds across situations.
One success can provide valuable experience, but generalization requires further grounds. Counterexamples are particularly important: the individual needs to learn when a method helps and when a different approach is needed.
Learning can also remain at the candidate stage. Insufficient evidence, unmet conditions, or failed evaluation can justify deferral or rejection. A new skill need not emerge from every activity or every sleep cycle.
The change worth observing is whether later understanding and behavior improve: does the individual identify problems earlier, choose more suitable methods, reduce similar errors, or refrain when an approach does not apply? When a saved method is revised or withdrawn, later use must refer to the correct version while retaining what actually happened in the past.
5. How sleep consolidates experience and learning
HomoErectus designs sleep as a formal runtime mode, with entry conditions, consolidation work, stage records, and continuity into waking.
Entering sleep requires considering waking activity, fatigue, cognitive load, recent experience, and Working Memory pressure, as well as checking whether current activities can be safely paused. Work that cannot readily be interrupted needs to reach an appropriate point first. Important unsaved content also needs proper handling.
During sleep, scheduling of waking foreground activity is suspended. Existing goals, commitments, and waiting relationships remain. External stimuli continue to be collected, and psychological state continues to evolve under its corresponding rules.
What is consolidated during sleep
Sleep connects recent experience with existing memories and identifies content worth further processing, including:
- Grouping related experiences while retaining important turning points and causal connections.
- Checking conflicts in understanding and distinguishing what needs revision, supplementation, or continued uncertainty.
- Reviewing changes and tensions in preferences, self-understanding, and long-term goals.
- Evaluating method candidates left by activities and connecting them with existing knowledge and skills.
- Organizing unresolved questions to prepare cues for thinking after waking.
This work needs to read actual materials and produce results. Simple synthesis can produce attributed summaries. Work requiring further retrieval, validation, or multiple steps uses the existing activity mechanisms and saves its results through the appropriate memory and knowledge modules.
Each item needs to retain whether it is complete, unfinished, failed, or deferred. A sleep report should reflect these actual states. Consolidation that reaches no new conclusion can also be a reasonable result.
How dreams participate and remain distinct from reality
The project also designs dreams as explicitly marked internal experiences. They can recombine existing materials, simulate situations, and leave emotional aftereffects, questions, or ideas awaiting validation.
For example, an individual may recombine an unresolved experience in an internal simulation and discover a possibility worth investigating. That possibility can enter later thought, but requires real-world grounds before it can become valid understanding of the external world.
Dreamed conversations, bodily experiences, and actions also need to retain their internal-experience provenance. They cannot be recorded as real commitments from others, external actions that have occurred, or new permissions.
How life continues after waking
On waking, the system forms an internal brief based on actual consolidation results, current concerns, and outstanding obligations, helping the individual return to life.
Questions or new understanding emerging from consolidation become material for attention and choices. The individual still needs to combine them with its waking state, information that has arrived, and existing responsibilities to decide what to do next.
Urgent stimuli can interrupt sleep after progress is safely saved. After handling them, the individual needs to determine from the actual situation whether to resume the original consolidation cycle or enter waking activity. Interruption and recovery must preserve completed and unfinished parts, avoiding both repeated processing and treating unfinished work as complete.
6. An example of self-directed learning across the process
The following is a hypothetical scenario illustrating how memory, learning, and sleep cooperate. It is not a record of Adam's actual operation.
Suppose an individual has a continuing interest in a research question. One day, it reads new material whose conclusion differs from what it remembers. The discrepancy arouses curiosity and connects with its unmet learning need, producing the question: “Why do these disagree?”
Working Memory holds the current question, new material, and existing understanding together. Narrative Memory helps it recall that an earlier judgment relied too heavily on a summary. Belief memory helps it find the original conclusion and its sources.
It decides to investigate further. Comparison reveals that the two materials concern different times and applicable conditions. It revises the relevant understanding from evidence while retaining the experience of why it previously misunderstood. The knowledge gap is partially resolved, and learning satisfaction and emotions may change accordingly.
The experience also leaves a method candidate: when comparing conflicting conclusions, first check sources, time, and scope. The candidate needs to include the actual approach, this example, and limitations. Whether it works in other situations still requires examination.
During sleep, the individual may connect this experience with earlier similar misjudgments, evaluate the method further, and retain unanswered questions. Consolidation may revise relevant knowledge, suggest further learning, or lead to a more specific understanding of its limitations.
After waking, this content participates in mental activity again. The individual may wonder: “Could an earlier conclusion of mine also apply only within a particular scope?” It can form a new investigative idea or retain the question for later when a more important responsibility takes priority.
When it later encounters another set of materials, the key evidence of transfer is whether it proactively checks sources and conditions and recognizes situations where the old method does not apply.
7. How to tell whether memory, learning, and sleep support growth
Validation needs to connect experience, internal change, and subsequent performance.
For memory, it must examine whether the individual can retrieve past experiences, sources, and unfinished matters in a new context while preserving distinctions among personal observation, reports from others, inference, and dreams.
For learning, it needs to explain the previous knowledge gap or capability limitation, the experience supporting change, what specifically was revised, and how those changes were later used. Correctly judging non-applicability is also important evidence.
For sleep, it needs to examine what consolidation actually completed, what remains unfinished, whether interrupted work can continue, and whether its results are used in mental activity and behavior after waking.
We aim to establish a continuing relationship: experience enters memory; learning and consolidation change knowledge, self-understanding, and methods; these changes interact with goals, desires, and emotions, making a difference to later ideas, choices, and actions.