What if memory were not a library, but a landscape? This essay traces the development of SPIRALbase and Hybrid-J - a research program that replaces the idea of memory as indexed storage with memory as a physical potential: a high-dimensional terrain of attractor basins that a system falls into rather than looks up. Beginning with the question of whether biological memory could be realised digitally, we walk through three generations of architecture: from early context-gated attractor networks trained by pseudo-likelihood, through metric-derived projectors that open precise subspaces on demand, to Hybrid-J -- a block-structured substrate with a shared core, local context blocks, and controlled sparse bridges between them.
Robin Langell (Sun,) studied this question.