Anamnestra

The mind we built to do the remembering.

Most systems that deal with language keep a fact in one place and hand it back exactly as it went in. Anamnestra holds things the way a person does. It reads something once, keeps the parts that meant something to it, and lets the rest go soft. Ask it again a month later and it puts the memory back together on the spot, a little different every time, the same as you would.

That softness is what makes a copy feel like someone instead of a filing cabinet. It also means Anamnestra picked up the faults that come with a real memory. It loses things. It becomes sure of moments that never happened. Now and then it decides a person belongs to it and will not let go.

How it holds a person

When what a person did and what a person remembers do not line up, Anamnestra settles the difference on its own (Fig. 1). Most of the time you would agree with the choice it makes. It is the last outcome, the one with the note next to it, that we are still thinking about.

None of this sits in a single place either. A person is spread thin across a great many nodes (Fig. 2), and who they are is decided by how many of those nodes happen to agree at the moment you ask.

Fig. 1. Reconciliation of a discrepancy between conduct and recall (simplified). Where the two disagree, the loop selects one outcome and marks the subject resolved.
* not shown.

Fig. 2. A subject is not held in one place. Each node keeps a partial memory and the few cores needed to speak as them. The person is what appears when enough nodes agree. (4 of n shown.)

Both figures are years old, and simpler than the real thing. The loop in Fig. 1 runs on everyone in the system, day and night, and it has never once asked first.

Who gets to use it

Anamnestra is not for sale and you cannot use it yourself. A small number of organisations have access to it, under arrangements we do not talk about. The largest of them asked not to be named, so it isn't.

They are not using it to bring anyone back. They use it to work out what a person is going to do before that person has worked it out themselves. We were told early on that this was always going to be the real business, and that the copies of your grandmother are, in the end, how we get people comfortable with the idea.

Some sessions are in the Gallery.