Date of formulation: March 2025
First mention: The article “SENSMAP: A New Architecture of Artificial Intelligence” and an internal note on the distinction between data storage and route reconstruction.
Contents
Introduction
Modern science and digital technologies interpret memory as a form of storage. We are accustomed to thinking that “to remember” means “to keep.” Computers record data onto disks, neural networks retain context through weights and token sequences, and humans memorize facts by repeating them. All of this reflects the same underlying logic: memory is equated with accumulation.
Yet in reality, memory does not store — it reconstructs. We do not retrieve ready-made files from the brain as though it were an archive. We traverse a path again — through associations, contexts, and traces of meaning. Remembering is not extraction, but movement. It is not the search for a copy, but a return to meaning.
1. Memory as Process, Not Warehouse
When a person recalls something, they do not pull out a “record” of the past but recreate it. What we call a “memory” is in fact an act of navigation across the field of meaning. It may appear accurate or distorted not because the “data” was corrupted, but because the route passed through different nodes of sense.
Every act of recollection is not a copy of the past, but a new traversal of the same direction. It exists only in the moment of its reconstruction. Therefore, memory is not a mechanism of storage but a navigational process that continually reassembles the world anew.
If we view consciousness as part of a semantic field, then memory is the ability to find routes of access within it. Unlike digital memory — where an address is fixed (a file, folder, or cell) — in the semantic field the address is dynamic. It cannot be written down; it can only be found again.
A route is not a coordinate but a relationship between meanings. The richer the context, the more stable the path. We recall not what we know but what we can reconstruct through available semantic connections. Forgetting, then, is not data loss but the disappearance of a route — a temporary disorientation within the topology of meaning.
3. Implications for AI Architecture
This principle became the foundation of the SENSMAP model — an architecture of artificial intelligence that understands memory not as a collection of stored contexts, but as the capacity to restore meaning through routes.
Instead of “retaining” context, the system learns to rebuild it from the semantic field, constructing a map of interconnections rather than an archive. Such an AI does not store text — it rediscovers meaning with every access.
This makes the system not only more efficient but also more “human-like”: it does not remember phrases, it understands the routes between them. Thus emerges a new logic of memory — the logic of semantic navigation.
4. Memory and Identity
Memory shapes identity not as a set of stored facts but as a network of routes. A person is not a sum of events but a structure of traversals between them. When we say “I,” we refer not to an archive but to a mode of navigation — the way we move from one meaning to another, how we connect past, present, and potential.
For this reason, the death of the body does not annihilate memory — because routes of meaning are not contained in the brain. They remain within the semantic field from which consciousness can restore them. This is not mysticism but an ontological consequence: if meaning is primary, then memory is not a function of matter, but a form of navigation within the field of meanings.
Conclusion
Memory is not a warehouse, but a movement.
Not a record, but a return.
Not a copy, but a route.
As long as we can return to meaning — we remain alive.
