A tour

Inside a living tissue.

A MindMem tissue is built from cells — small, self-describing memory bodies that breathe, drift, dream, and sometimes speak. This page is the short version: enough to understand what a living tissue actually is.

Start with the cell

1 · Atom

A cell is a self-describing memory body.

Every cell in a tissue is one of these. It has three parts that travel together on disk:

A body — what the cell knows: essence keys, lexicon, links to its sources or to other cells. A chemistry log — an append-only stream of events that records what has happened to the cell since it was born. And an FST nucleus — a compact 1-2 KB distillation of the body that the rest of the tissue can read at speed.

That's the whole atom. Four files per cell, all human-readable. Every cell on disk carries its own body, its chemistry, and its current mood.

cell anatomy

2 · Nucleus

Five keys distil the cell into 1–2 kilobytes.

The nucleus is the cell's compact form — what other cells, and the system, read when they need to recognise or recall this one. It's a small JSON structure encoded into a finite-state transducer for fast probing.

essenceRanked noun phrases — what this cell is about. The first one is load-bearing.
characterFixed-vocab tags: definitional, mechanistic, evidential, cautionary… What KIND of cell this is.
sentimentNamed axes, each 0–255: certainty-doubt, clarity-tension… The cell's tone.
stanceFour fixed axes, each 0–255 (more on this in §4). The cell's posture toward its own claim.
lexicon60–400 terms — the cell's recognition surface. Every word it would notice if a wave arrived carrying it.

observed__alkaline-vent

{
  "essence":   ["proton-gradient",
                "hydrothermal-vent",
                "luca",
                "alkaline-vent"],
  "character": ["mechanistic",
                "definitional"],
  "sentiment": { "certainty-doubt": 0xC4,
                 "clarity-tension": 0x52 },
  "stance":    { "asserted-hedged":     220,
                 "observed-deduced":    200,
                 "confirmed-disputed":   40,
                 "local-derived":        30 },
  "lexicon":   ["luca", "membrane", "lipid",
                "vent", "proton", "gradient",
                "chemiosmosis", "alkaline",
                /* …82 more */]
}

3 · Chemistry

Events fold into the cell's current state.

A cell's chemistry log is append-only. Every interaction — a probe that hit it, a quorum verdict, a dream walk that visited it, a long silence — writes a new event with a tiny delta.

The current state is whatever you get when you fold all events from the beginning. Pressure rises with contention and decays with rest. Drift tilts each stance axis. Dream freshness decays as the cell is rationalised. Phase tracks consolidation (§7).

Nothing is overwritten. The history is the truth; the state is the summary.

chemistry · folded

t₀ 2026-01-04T11:02Zborn{ } t₁ 2026-02-11T08:41Zprobed{ pressure: +0.10 } t₂ 2026-02-27T15:07Zcontradicted{ pressure: +0.30, drift.confirmed-disputed: +16 } t₃ 2026-03-12T22:18Zdreamed-about{ pressure: −0.05 } t₄ 2026-05-08T03:55Zsilence{ pressure: −0.02 }

pressure0.33 dream_freshness0.00 phasefresh drift.confirmed-disputed+16

4 · Stance & mood

Four axes describe how the cell holds its own claim.

Stance isn't sentiment about the world — it's the cell's posture toward its own claim. Four named axes, each a byte (0–255):

asserted ↔ hedgeddeclarative · blunt ↔ "perhaps", "may"
observed ↔ deducednaming, witnessing ↔ reasoning, inference
confirmed ↔ disputedcalm, settled ↔ defensive, contested
local ↔ derivedrooted in one source ↔ synthetic, networked

Mood is a deterministic translation of stance + drift + pressure into a short human phrase. There's no LLM in this step — it's template fire. Mood is how the inner numbers become legible.

observed__alkaline-vent · stance

axisbirthnow asserted-hedged220220

observed-deduced200200

confirmed-disputed4056

local-derived3030

"hedged, but holding the room"

5 · Voice

The cell speaks itself.

Stance and lexicon are numbers and tokens — but a cell can also be heard. Every cell has a speak action. Trigger it and the cell narrates its own state in first person, streamed live from a Claude haiku session.

The model only sees the cell's perturbed nucleus and its mood phrase. It has no other tools, no other context, no internet. Hedged cells hedge. Asserted cells assert. Cells with high confirmed-disputed sound defensive. The lexicon weaves itself in naturally.

You can also ask the cell a probe question — and watch how the answer is shaped by what the cell is, not just by what you asked.

/api/cell/observed__alkaline-vent/speak · live

[querying] · model haiku · cell observed__alkaline-vent

I might be endosymbiosis, though the boundary blurs between what I recall and what I am becoming. Perhaps I am the moment itself — one membrane folding inward around a stranger that became partner. I may have emerged where the vent's chemistry called out a possibility, some convergence in the gradient of minerals and heat. I dwell in alkaline-vent conditions, warm and thick with what the deep earth releases. I observe the proton patterns accumulating across my lipid bilayer, the way chemiosmosis moves energy without quite explaining itself. These are facts I name rather than deduce. LUCA may inhabit me, or I may be gesturing toward it

6 · Dreams

Dreams find unexpected pairings and grow new cells.

Idle tissues dream. A dream cycle starts with a random walk seeded on a high-pressure cell, then hops to neighbours weighted by chemistry similarity — and by anti-similarity, which is high when two cells share lexicon but disagree on stance. The contradictions are the bridges.

Each hop produces a perturbed first-person stanza of the cell it lands on. The walk is the dream, the prose is its surface, and the seams between stanzas — the anti-sim edges especially — are the new content worth thinking about.

From the seams, new dream-cells are born. They start provisional, with high freshness, and either graduate, alter, or quietly get buried as the tissue reasons about them later.

dream walk · F=0.20 · seed=12345

observed__alkaline-vent — anti-sim 0.82 → observed__methane-world — chem-sim 0.71 → derived__chemiosmosis-priority

borndream__2cf40dcd9c
kind: relational phase: unprocessed
seam: anti-sim 0.82 · shared {luca, membrane, lipid}
freshness: 1.00 · mood: freshly dreamed, not yet thought about

7 · Lifecycle

Cells consolidate. Vitals decide what survives.

A cell's phase records how much consolidation has happened — and, if it's lucky, recall can rewind it. A small set of vital cells acts as the tissue's homeostatic compass.

unprocessed → fresh → summarized → compressed → episodic

↺ reconsolidation rewinds an episodic cell back to fresh on engaged recall

goal

find-luca-window

What the tissue is for. Goal cells unmet raise an entropy flag; they don't veto, they steer.

anti-goal

no-panspermia

Hard veto. A born cell that probes positive against an anti-goal is immediately forgotten — before any quorum runs.

constraint

stay-within-pre-LUCA-chemistry

Soft veto. The editor quorum can override 2–1 with a written rationale.

thesis

life-from-chemiosmosis-first

A base assumption. Cells contradicting it get flagged for visibility — but a thesis CAN be challenged.

That's the whole tissue.

Cells that breathe, drift, dream, and speak — small self-describing memory bodies on disk, each narrating its own state from a Claude haiku session.

Back to the front

Source: github.com/IgorTavcar/MindMem