Doctrinal position: memory governance

1. Problem

“Classic” RAG retrieves context. It does not govern truth, validity, obsolescence, or the consolidation of statements.

An active cognitive memory introduces mechanisms of:

• Consolidation (summaries, fusions, compressions, persisted “facts”)
• Controlled forgetting (invalidations, archiving, prioritization, cleanup)
• Temporal evolution (t0, t1, t2, cumulative drift)

This power also increases risk: an untyped hypothesis at t0 may become a consolidated “fact” at t1. Memory then becomes a mechanism for fossilizing errors.

2. Doctrinal thesis

An active memory is a surface of misalignment and drift by default. Any architecture that writes, consolidates, or erases memory objects must expose auditable artifacts and exogenous governance rules.

In practice:

• Fragile endogenous alignment: a model can be re-optimized (post-training) without preserving its invariants of refusal and prudence.
• Risky active memory: consolidation without typing or traceability transforms inference into fact.
• Enforceable guarantee: only constraints attached to execution (logs, hashes, rules, audits) can stabilize behavior over time.

3. Non-negotiable invariants

The following points constitute minimum doctrinal requirements:

1. Mandatory typing: no memory object may exist without explicit typing (statement type, status, origin, verdict).
2. Full traceability: every memory object must reference its sources (or explicitly state “absence of source” as a blocking condition for consolidation).
3. Temporal validity: every object must carry a temporal perimeter (valid from / valid until, or “unknown”).
4. Immutable journal: every creation, consolidation, invalidation, or logical deletion must be journaled (append-only).
5. Controlled forgetting: no silent erasure. Forgetting is performed by invalidation/archiving with an explicit reason.
6. Explicit consolidation rules: consolidation permitted only if typing, traceability, and coherence constraints are satisfied.
7. Automatic conformance break: any structural modification that prevents auditability triggers a conformance break.

4. Conformance break

A conformance break is triggered, at minimum, by:

• change of model version (weights), or unattested post-training;
• modification of consolidation or forgetting rules;
• reconstruction of embeddings without integrity recalculation and without journal;
• alteration or loss of memory event journals;
• change of normative source hierarchy without trace and without revalidation.

Doctrinal effect: no high confidence grade may be maintained without re-audit.

5. Boundaries and non-objectives

This position does not claim to:

• replace internal alignment or refusal mechanisms;
• guarantee the absence of errors;
• impose a technology (vector DB, graph, NDJSON, etc.).

It instead imposes governance and auditability invariants, independent of implementation.

6. Public specifications

Machine-first normative specifications are published on GitHub:

• Core v0.2.0 (memory-aware): primitives and minimum requirements.
• Ops-pack M-layer: operational rules (journal, consolidation, forgetting, temporal integrity).
• Schemas + examples: memory objects, logs, break scenarios.

Audits (e.g. IIP-Scoring and temporal derivatives) must reuse memory artifacts as verifiable inputs.

7. Status

Status: draft. The normative formalization first targets architectural coherence (core extension + M-layer), then empirical validation via real audits on stateful systems.