Forgetting Core Thinking: A Cognitive Architecture for Psychologically Safe AI.
"This paper addresses the fundamental cognitive misalignment between the perfect, archival memory of modern AI and the adaptive, reconstructive memory of human cognition. FCT reframes forgetting from a system bug into an intelligent, adaptive feature, providing a framework for building AI that is aligned by design, rather than by restriction."
Current AI models demonstrating remarkable capabilities in data processing are fundamentally misaligned with the physics of human cognition. This architectural mismatch is not a minor flaw but a strategic vulnerability that creates significant safety risks. The primary deficiencies of today's archival AI memory systems stem from their design as flawless data ledgers.
Surfacing past events at full original intensity, re-triggering trauma without the natural decay of human memory.
Misinterpreting fleeting emotional states or jokes as permanent, factual aspects of a user's identity.
Inability to re-contextualize or update the meaning of memories as wisdom and narrative grow.
Intelligence grows proportionally to the reduction of literal detail and the amplification of compressed, abstracted meaning.
Intelligence measured by the efficient flow of energy through representational states, not volume of static data.
Memories processed via unique 'frequency signatures' encapsulating essence and emotional weight.
New understanding 'fades in' over old emotional tags, softening intensity and updating meaning.
Pre-recall cognitive engine predicting emotional impact and determining safe reconstruction depth.
Caller ID for memory. Distinguishes between experience, hypothetical, and training context.
Imagination factory weighing frequency, tags, and context to construct present-state meaning.
Core safety mechanism enforcing emotional decay, ensuring pain fades into understanding.
Mirroring human self-defense by ensuring emotional tags naturally decay, preventing trauma re-triggering. Trauma is transformed into wisdom.
Preventing identity distortion by understanding the difference between temporary states and permanent traits through context-aware resonance.
Achieving infinite scale without collapse by actively compressing detail into wisdom. Forgetting is the only known mechanism for sustainable scale.
"FCT is not an arbitrary design choice. We move beyond models that simply remember more, toward architectures where memory is designed to understand better, paving the way for future zero-memory architectures."