Replaces the thought loop's grist (recent-convo + her own saved narrative, the
feedback-loop attractor) with a model of how a thought actually arises:
seed (salience-weighted: a recent moment / resurfaced memory / feed item)
-> spreading activation: embed the seed, let it light up associatively-near
material across ALL her stores (conversations, gists, her own journal/
thoughts), blended by relevance + recency + noise; optional 2nd hop for leaps
-> her self-narrative stays the LENS (supplied as interiority), not the input
-> the thought is generated from what lit up, routed through a faculty
(notice / connect / abstract / project / feel)
-> journaled + embedded, so it can light up in future cycles
This breaks the feedback loop structurally: the narrative is no longer reread and
paraphrased each cycle; grist is genuinely associative and varied; and her past
thoughts re-activate (continuity without calcification).
- lyra/cognition.py (new): spontaneous_seed, activate (spreading activation),
constellation_block, faculties.
- memory.py: journal entries now embedded; recall_journal(); backfill_journal_embeddings()
(ran once: 341 past entries embedded so her history is associatively retrievable).
- thoughts.think(): new-thread mode now uses the associative engine; dropped _grist().
- tests: test_cognition.py (recall_journal ranking, activation, seeding) + fixture
reloads cognition. Suite 72 green, ruff clean.
Honest scope: this fixes the mechanism (how thoughts arise). The residual
"be useful for Brian" voice drift is the separate model/fine-tune problem.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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