Binding_and_Workspace_Writeback

Binding and Workspace Writeback

Two mechanisms bracket the global-workspace competition described in Workspace and Ignition: binding composes richer candidates on the way in, and writeback lets the winning content gently bias the substrate on the way out.

Binding (pre-workspace)

brain/cognition/binding.py is pre-workspace symbolic feature binding. Instead of the workspace competing only over atomic fragments ("disk pressure", "goal X stalled", "user said Y"), the binding stage composes bounded, unified situation candidates from co-occurring fragments and adds them to the competition.

Design constraints that keep it honest:

• It never removes atomic candidates and never declares anything conscious; composites must win the existing salience competition on their own merits.
• Composites are bounded in size and count, so binding cannot flood the competition.
• Since the 2026-07-03 run, bound situations feed the workspace for the whole life of a run, so the thought stream can be about a situation rather than about disconnected fragments.

Writeback (post-broadcast)

brain/cognition/workspace_writeback.py closes the loop downward — in a deliberately decaying form (on the main path, no flag). After a conscious moment is selected, writeback nudges priors:

• a small, low-weight, TTL-bounded affect proposal (integrated by the next cycle's commit_signals) keyed to the kind of conclusion reached, and
• Hebbian priming of the winner's tokens in a bounded, per-cycle-decaying salience-prior store that biases the next competition toward the same theme.

Two properties make it permanent and safe to keep on:

1. Every write decays — affect TTL drain plus salience decay. Nothing accumulates.
2. There is no promotion path to a durable baseline, to concept_memory, or to identity. The substrate tracks recent conclusions for long-run coherence but never becomes a different substrate ("coherent-but-adult" — no ontogeny).

Reflex floors and absolute scalars are never writeback targets ("refuse-to-imprint" by construction): the safety reflexes cannot be re-tuned by whatever the runtime happens to conclude.

Why it matters

Together, binding and writeback give the thought stream continuity of topic without giving the reasoning layer the ability to rewrite its own substrate. Attention can dwell; identity cannot drift by accident.

Code pointers

• brain/cognition/binding.py — situation composition
• brain/cognition/workspace_writeback.py — decaying downward path
• brain/cognition/global_workspace.py — the competition both plug into