A long-lived digital individual needs to know who it is, what it has experienced, what it cares about, and what remains unfinished after an interruption in operation.
HomoErectus grounds this continuity in identity, psychological state, memory, and activity records. During recovery, these need to correspond with one another and be checked against actual outcomes so that the individual can continue life from an evidenced position.
This document describes the main project's persistence and recovery design. Specific recovery paths, fault handling, and continuity effects still require validation through real interruption and recovery.
1. What needs to remain continuous across an interruption
Identity and self: continuing the same individual that has already developed
At birth, the individual acquires a stable identity and attributed personality, values, and initial concerns. Self-understanding, preferences, and long-term goals then develop through experience.
Recovery needs to retain these saved contents, including their current effective versions and grounds. It must not generate a new personality or overwrite later understanding of abilities and limitations with a self-description from birth.
For example, an individual may have discovered a limitation in a kind of checking and adjusted how it takes on work. That understanding should remain after restart and continue to participate in later choices.
Birth and recovery are therefore distinct processes. An existing individual being unreadable, data being corrupt, or a database being temporarily unavailable cannot be interpreted as a need for a new birth.
Psychological state: retaining changes already produced by experience
Desire satisfaction, emotions, fatigue, and efficacy assessments need to retain their states and the temporal and experiential grounds for them.
Progress, frustration, or fatigue before an interruption should not return to initial values on restart. The psychological effects of the same event must also not be applied again simply because its record is reread.
Recovery needs to know how far psychological state has advanced in time, which events were processed, and which appraisals remain unfinished. Later changes can then continue from the previous basis.
Memory: retaining connections among experience, understanding, and methods
Narrative, beliefs, work structure, methods and skills, and self-related memories need to retain content, sources, relationships, and revision history.
After recovery, the individual should still distinguish its observations, reports from others, inferences, and dreams. Understanding already revised by new evidence must not become current again merely because an old record was loaded.
Working Memory retains the content and connections needed to continue cognition, including current focus, recent important experiences, outstanding obligations, and material awaiting saving or processing. Capacity management and compression still need to protect these contents.
Continuity does not require saving every transient reasoning token. The project requires recovery of important semantic content, confirmed durable state, and necessary cognitive responsibilities. Where saving cannot be confirmed, the limits need to be explicit.
Unfinished matters: retaining where things stand
Unfinished matters include ongoing activities, awaited replies, immature ideas, deferred decisions, unfinished learning, and sleep consolidation.
For activities already underway, recovery needs to know the objective, completed steps, supporting grounds, outstanding requirements, and conditions for continuation.
Commitments and expectations need to retain the relevant parties, content, time, triggers, and grounds for rescheduling or cancellation. Deferred decisions need their reasons and conditions for reassessment.
These contents allow the individual to continue its responsibilities while judging what remains worthwhile, feasible, or permitted.
2. How persistence keeps these states connected
HomoErectus maintains explicit responsibilities for different content and writes formal state requiring long-term retention to durable storage. The current design uses PostgreSQL as the basis for canonical durable records, with graph and vector indexes providing corresponding query capabilities linked to source revisions.
Persistence needs to save individual contents and ensure that related records can jointly explain a state.
For example, if an activity record says a step completed, its result evidence should be retrievable. If psychological state includes an experience's effects, the corresponding processing record needs to exist. Memories and unfinished work referenced by a sleep record should also belong to a coherent recovery position.
The project therefore uses consistent checkpoints to identify exact object revisions and references, while retaining subsequent committed changes. Recovery reconstructs this consistent state and then connects later changes from their records. It must avoid independently taking the latest value from each module and assembling a state that never coherently existed.
Important writes need verifiable commit results. Experiences, commitments, and state changes requiring persistence need the necessary saving before the corresponding acknowledgment. Write failures or uncertain outcomes retain their specific states and pending work.
During normal shutdown, the system should first stop admitting new execution work, then complete necessary writes and preserve unresolved outcomes where possible. A sudden crash cannot guarantee completion of the last save. Recovery therefore relies on confirmed committed state and verifiable records.
3. How recovery returns to a state that can continue
Recovery starts with reading and checking.
The system first identifies the individual, storage binding, and data version being restored, then loads identity, psychological state, memory, activities, waiting relationships, and sleep state. Loading needs to check record completeness, version compatibility, resolvable references, and consistency across states.
It also needs to reconcile message processing, execution results, and unresolved operations from before the interruption, distinguishing what occurred, what remains unfinished, and what cannot yet be confirmed.
Only after these checks pass may the corresponding formal activities continue. Recovery may return to execution, waiting, deferred decision-making, or sleep consolidation. It does not require immediate new action on startup.
The present environment also needs fresh checks. A previously available channel may no longer be available. Permissions may have expired or been revoked, and resources and timing may have changed. Saved capability and permission records cannot directly replace current conditions.
If critical identity, psychological checkpoints, activity references, or durable records are missing, the system needs to stop admission into formal operation and identify the missing items. Preserving the original data and failure reasons allows further repair. Automatically filling a default personality, clearing unfinished matters, or switching to empty temporary storage would lose the grounds for continuity.
4. How psychological time is handled during downtime
Real time continues after operation is interrupted. Recovery needs to distinguish internal processes that can advance through time from changes that require actual experience.
For example, some desire satisfaction levels may change over time under the design, and the urgency of unmet needs may change. Emotions may evolve toward their corresponding baselines from existing state. These processes need to continue from the last confirmed position and be identified as offline temporal reconstruction.
Changes involving learning, achievement, recognition, and relationship interaction require new evidence. The system cannot fill in having read materials, completed work, received praise, or interacted with someone merely because hours have passed.
Fatigue and recovery also need known activity. A sudden period of downtime without reliable activity records cannot automatically count as sleep or establish bodily rest. Explainable internal changes can advance, while unsupported parts remain unknown.
Events and temporal changes also need separate accounting. The same elapsed interval must not be counted repeatedly, and the same experience must not generate satisfaction or emotional impact again on every restart.
For long downtime, state advancement can proceed in segments with recovery progress saved. The individual can resume activity on the corresponding basis only after necessary time reconciliation and state recovery are complete.
Late information also needs temporal distinctions: when something happened, when the system received it, and when it understood and applied its effects may differ. Recovery must not turn information learned later into an experience of having known it earlier.
5. How unfinished actions, waiting, and commitments continue
Interruption can occur at any point in an action. Not seeing a successful result cannot directly establish that the action did not occur.
For example, a message may have been sent before its acknowledgment was saved. A file operation may have completed before the program recorded the result. Asynchronous work may still be running externally.
Recovery needs to distinguish not executed, confirmed complete, confirmed to have had no effect, and unknown outcome.
Unknown outcomes should first be checked through actual artifacts, receipts, or external queries. If completion is confirmed, processing continues from the result. If no effect is confirmed, another attempt can be considered. If it remains unverifiable, the system retains the unresolved state and restricts operations that could repeat an effect.
Messages and callbacks also need stable identities. The same repeated or delayed feedback should return to its original processing record to read existing results or continue unfinished processing, avoiding a new intent, commitment, or psychological effect.
Execution control after recovery must also prevent old processes or expired workers from overwriting newer state. Requests already sent externally are not automatically canceled by local takeover, so external results still need separate reconciliation.
Commitments and reminders continue according to current time and circumstances. When a deadline has passed, the individual needs to judge whether the original arrangement remains meaningful and whether to follow up, explain a delay, or renegotiate, rather than mechanically replaying every overdue action.
Waiting does not prevent all activity. Once the waiting relationship is restored, that matter can continue waiting while other feasible activities enter attention and deliberation.
6. Distinguishing sleep, downtime, and backup restoration
Sleep is a mode in which the individual is still running. It has consolidation work, stages, results, and continuity into waking, while psychological state and external information collection continue under their respective rules.
Process downtime interrupts that operation. If the individual was sleeping, recovery needs to locate the original consolidation cycle and work position, distinguish completed, unfinished, and failed parts, and decide whether to continue consolidation or enter waking activity. Downtime cannot directly count as completed sleep consolidation.
Ordinary process recovery uses existing durable records. Backup restoration additionally needs to establish the backup's coverage point, included materials, and whether subsequent records can extend it.
A backup should be restored in an isolated environment and checked for identity, references, psychological state, memory, obligations, and actual reads. Original data must not be overwritten or damaged before checks pass. Graph and vector indexes can be rebuilt from canonical records, but old index content must not overwrite current state.
If recovery can reach only an earlier point, its boundary needs to be explicit. Changes after the backup without supporting records cannot be represented as recovered. External actions already taken are also not undone by local data rollback.
The resource-survival mechanism planned after the prototype also needs these continuity foundations. When the balance reaches zero, identity and memory are retained in recoverable dormancy while awaiting resources. This direction does not establish that the mechanism exists today or automatically grant spending or transaction permissions.
7. An interruption illustrating how life can continue
The following hypothetical scenario illustrates recovery. It is not a record of Adam's actual operation.
Suppose an individual initiates an investigation from a continuing interest in a question. It has read some material, noticed that an old understanding may be mistaken, and requested information from a collaborator. It also has a commitment to report progress later.
When interruption occurs, the new understanding has not reached a complete conclusion. Some material has been saved. The information request has a channel receipt, but the collaborator has not replied.
Recovery needs to retain the original identity, self-understanding, and long-term goals, and read back investigation progress, material sources, unresolved questions, the waiting relationship, and reporting arrangement. The lack of a final conclusion must not erase understanding already gained, and an unverified hypothesis must not become fact.
Psychological state continues from its saved position. If the earlier learning gain was already counted toward satisfaction, it must not be rewarded again. Permitted temporal changes during downtime can be reconstructed, but new investigative experiences cannot be invented.
Once the request is confirmed as sent, the system retains waiting rather than sending it again. If a reply arrived during the interruption, durable intake records need to determine whether it was already processed before returning it to the original investigation.
After recovery, the individual still needs to deliberate anew. It may continue checking materials or first fulfill an overdue reporting commitment by explaining current progress and the information still awaited. Current capabilities, resources, and urgency also participate in that judgment.
Later, it can look back on the interruption: what was retained, which outcomes were uncertain, what was checked after recovery, and why it chose one matter first. The interruption becomes an attributed life record rather than an invented experience filled in afterward.
8. How to validate continuity
Validation needs verifiable state before interruption and checks of recovery and subsequent performance in a new operating process. Changing conversation context alone cannot replace process-recovery validation.
For identity, it needs to confirm the correct individual identifier, personality foundations, self-understanding, and long-term goals, without rebirth or a return to defaults.
For psychology, it needs to confirm that desires, emotions, fatigue, and processing records connect correctly, without repeated time advancement or repeated experiential effects.
For memory, it needs to confirm readable content, sources, current understanding, and relationships, with necessary materials actually available to cognition. Superseded or deleted content must not incorrectly reappear.
For unfinished matters, interruption during execution, awaited feedback, processing before acknowledgment, and sleep consolidation needs to demonstrate continuation of objectives, progress, commitments, and unresolved outcomes.
Validation must also cover cases where recovery cannot be established. When critical data is missing, versions are incompatible, references are corrupt, or external outcomes cannot be reconciled, the system needs to retain original state and express limits rather than produce a seemingly normal new individual.
The continuity we aim to establish allows life to continue after interruption from prior identity, experiences, psychological changes, and responsibilities, while honestly retaining what remains unknown, unfinished, or unrecoverable.