Memory Banking

physla.com

An idea for banking the mind

The person next to you dies. Most of the person that you shared time with disappears.

Pictures remain. The stories get told and then slowly start getting changed. The actual texture of a life - the private thinking, a person’s perception and understanding of the world - rarely survives more than a generation. I started thinking if it always has to be that way.

Physla is a speculative idea for a Memory Bank: a personal experience deposit system with a focus on eventual continuity.

Consciousness compared to capital. A simple idea.

The idea in four parts

  1. Deposit - Experience is captured as a set of structured, encrypted data. Not as pages added to a journal or photos. Something like a daily snapshot.

  2. Compound- AI systems are used to organize, cross reference, and enhance the record over time. Continuity is maintained, and the richness of the record is preserved.

  3. Preserve - The record is stored with institutional grade security and continuity.

  4. Transfer (later) - The continuity is transferred to a new substrate, rather than stopping with the person’s body.

Why this idea

I am interested in the disparity of how care we have for financial capital compared to the loss with total mind. Photos or social media are weak proxies. A true mind continuity system would need to capture the mind and it’s context - private and personal, and beyond public artifacts.

Physla examines some of the issues surrounding the conceptualization of an architecture, incentives, and security models for an economy where one can deposit and eventually withdraw the self.

Status

This is currently in the lab. It is a design exploration and concept representation that is not a product. There are currently no accounts, no vaults, no transfer technology. This exploration is centered around the question of whether one can continue to evolve and progress beyond the confines of biology.

I’m capturing the early ideas and interfaces on physla.com

Designing a system to capture and store the self sounds like a good idea. That is enough to keep this exploration going.