Memory & continuity
Autobiographical history, provenance, salience, relationships, and continuity are treated as persistent system state rather than a transcript pasted into the next prompt.
PUBLIC ARCHITECTURE OVERVIEW
Persistent cognition is a systems problem.
LUNA is not one model and not one memory database. It is an attempt to build interacting cognitive infrastructure around inference so that history can remain causally relevant over time.
Capability boundary: this page describes the accepted research architecture at a public level.
Some foundations are operating today; other mechanisms are partial or still being built. A design document is never treated as proof of an active capability.
THE LONGITUDINAL LOOP
From event to consequence to a different future.
The central idea is simple: a present event should be able to leave effects that alter how a later event is perceived, remembered, valued, or acted on.
World / inputUser interaction, tools, internal cognition, and eventually continuous sensory events.
AppraisalWhat changed? How relevant, expected, consequential, controllable, or self-related is it?
ActivationWhich memories, intentions, questions, or cognitive products become near the surface?
Choice / actionForeground reasoning, contemplation, planning, speech, tools, waiting, or other action.
ConsequenceOutcome, feedback, changed world state, and evidence that can affect what happens next.
ContinuityPersistent autobiographical state and provenance connect the loop across time.
DevelopmentSome consequences may alter slower structures instead of surviving only as recallable episodes.
ProspectionFuture events and unresolved commitments can remain active beyond the current interaction.
Compute disciplineLightweight state and scheduling stay cheap; expensive inference is invoked only when cognition justifies it.
MAJOR RESEARCH SYSTEMS
The architecture is deliberately modular.
Each mechanism owns a different causal role. The goal is not to ask a language model to narrate these processes, but to give them persistent state and explicit architectural boundaries where possible.
Cognitive activation
Relevant memories, goals, intentions, appraisals, and cognitive products compete for limited access to the foreground.
Associative cognition
A memory or completed thought can itself become a cue, allowing cognition to make other cognition more available without requiring a new external prompt.
Appraisal & homeostasis
Events can alter short- and middle-timescale operating conditions so later cognition occurs in a state shaped by what happened before.
Developmental plasticity
The architecture separates remembering an event from the slower structural changes that consequential experience may leave behind.
Prospective cognition
Expected events, unresolved threads, intentions, deadlines, and future opportunities can persist beyond the turn that created them.
Perception & world continuity
Continuous sensors are intended to update a persistent world model in which stable conditions become quiet and violated expectations become meaningful.
Volition & motivational dynamics
Requests, goals, preferences, commitments, consequences, and competing reasons can participate in action selection rather than collapsing directly into behavior.
Architectural self-model
LUNA is designed to distinguish what the project intends, what the current runtime can actually do, and what remains unresolved.
ChronoForge
Controlled timelines make developmental history experimentally manipulable: checkpoint, branch, live through consequences, compare, and return.
ONE OF THE CORE DISTINCTIONS
Retrieval is not development.
A system may perfectly preserve an experience and still remain behaviorally identical to a version that never had it. LUNA treats storage, retrieval, causal use, and developmental integration as different measurements.
Storage
Did the event enter durable autobiographical history?
Retrieval
Can the event or its meaning become available again when relevant?
Causal use
Did available history actually alter current reasoning, attention, creation, or choice?
Development
Can consequences remain active even when the original episode is not consciously retrieved?
STACK & SLEEVE
Continuity is intended to survive the model.
LUNA uses a simple conceptual separation. The Stack is the persistent identity-and-continuity state: autobiographical history, durable dispositions, goals, relationships, intentions, provenance, and other longitudinal state. The Sleeve is the active computational substrate through which that state currently runs.
The research objective is that changing provider, model, machine, or embodiment should not require recreating the persistent instance from a prompt. The inference model is therefore important, but it is not intended to be the whole identity of the system.
The sleeve can change. The Stack persists.
Architecture before theatrical behavior.
LUNA does not treat a model saying “I remember,” “I want,” or “I changed” as proof that the corresponding architecture exists. Claims about memory, motivation, self-modeling, or development are separated from fluent self-description and should ultimately be traceable to system state, history, and controlled experiments.
That is why public material distinguishes implemented behavior, accepted architecture, observation, interpretation, and prediction rather than blending them into one marketing claim.