Continuity & communication

Continuity is not stable. It fades, distorts, and gets rewritten over time.

Layers within Continuity

Layer	Stores	Decay
Episodic	Specific events ("fire here, survived")	Fast
Semantic	Generalized beliefs ("fire = dangerous")	Medium
Procedural	Action patterns that worked	Slow
Social	Who matters, threat level, trust	Medium

What survives in Continuity is what gets used. What gets used shapes what the next generation learns.

Communication

There is no language at the start

Only primitive signals: postural/gestural cues, emotional state broadcast, basic intentional signals (approach, flee, follow, threat).

Co-occurrence

Repeated signal with context creates weak association in both Scintillae.

Stabilization

Reinforcement across interactions stabilizes into a shared token.

Imitation

Stable tokens transmit to nearby Scintillae.

Generations

Token sets grow, compress, and specialize over time.

Designed to produce shared reference. The minimum viable unit of culture.

Knowledge artifact

Discrete, moving, changing

{
  "id": "knowledge_fire",
  "type": "procedural",
  "origin_scintilla": "scintilla_0042",
  "origin_generation": 1,
  "current_confidence": 0.87,
  "spread_count": 14,
  "mutation_count": 2,
  "last_transmitted": "tick_18903",
  "status": "active"
}

Spread

Through communication and observation.

Mutate

Confidence degrades. Meaning shifts.

Decay

If no Scintilla practices or transmits it.

Myth

Token survives in social Continuity without anyone knowing how to use it.

Fog of war

Explored set per Scintilla. Confidence decay. Location sharing through social Continuity.

Generations