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Constructive Simulation & Provenance

Spector implements the Constructive Episodic Simulation Hypothesis (Schacter & Addis, 2007), allowing cognitive agents to recombine elements of past experiences into counterfactual scenarios while maintaining rigorous cryptographic and binary provenance.

1. Flexible Fragment Recombination

Unlike static centroid averaging, constructive simulation samples diverse candidate pairs across the top retrieval pool:

  1. Diversity Sampling: Deterministic pseudo-random pairing seeded by query hash ensures reproducible benchmark evaluations.
  2. Fragment Decomposition: Extracts entity links, temporal position, affective valence/arousal, and semantic vector embeddings.
  3. Alignment-Weighted Synthesis: Vector embeddings are blended proportionally to their narrative alignment with the agent's prior:
\[\mathbf{v}_{\text{sim}} = w_1 \mathbf{v}_1 + w_2 \mathbf{v}_2, \quad w_1 = \frac{\text{align}_1}{\text{align}_1 + \text{align}_2}\]
  1. Predictive Error Gate: Evaluated against PredictiveCodingNetwork hierarchical error to discard implausible counterfactual fantasies.

2. Cryptographic & Binary Provenance (MR-01)

Synthetic memories can lead to confabulation if unlabelled. Spector enforces provenance at the binary kernel layer:

Byte 34 (Consolidation Flags):
┌───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┬───┐
│ 7 │ 6 │ 5 │ 4 │ 3 │ 2 │ 1 │ 0 │
└───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┴───┘
          │
          └── Bit 5: FLAG_SIMULATED (0x20)
  • In-Memory: Candidates carry EncodingHeaderFields.FLAG_SIMULATED in consolidationFlags().
  • Durable Storage: Stamped into consolidation flags (byte 40 in EncodingHeaderLayout). Any downstream scan instantly identifies simulated records via EncodingHeaderFields.isSimulated(flags).
  • Soul Version Tracking: Persisted with soulVersion (bytes 46–47) indicating the exact agent configuration under which the simulation was generated.

3. High-Alignment Persistence Gate

Synthetic memories are not persisted indiscriminately. ConstructiveMemoryPersistenceRelay enforces that memories must meet an explicit narrative alignment threshold:

\[\text{alignSim} \ge \text{persistenceThreshold} \quad (\text{default: } 0.70)\]

Where alignSim is explicitly preserved in candidate metadata and passed directly to durable ingestion.

4. Benchmark Transparency

Spector tracks and publishes false-memory rates and gap-filling utility through the Cognitive Fidelity Benchmark Suite (ConstructiveRecallFidelityBenchmark), ensuring counterfactual synthesis enhances reasoning without polluting long-term factual recall.