RAG gives AI a library. SR-SI gives it something closer to a memory

RAG gives AI a library. SR-SI gives AI something closer to a memory.

The difference is smaller than you’d think, and potentially much bigger than we might be ready for.

I’m not claiming my project repo is conscious, far from it. It does however wear the project like clothes.

And that distinction matters more than you’d think.

Here’s what separates SR-SI from RAG - and why it points somewhere nobody expected.

RAG is curated by humans.
Someone decides what enters the knowledge base. What gets indexed. What matters. The structure is externally imposed. The AI retrieves from a library someone else built.

SR-SI is self-curated.
The agent builds its own index. Maintains it. Updates it. Decides, through the work itself, what’s worth remembering and what can be pruned.

Nobody tells it what matters. It determines that through accumulation.

That distinction is everything.

Because self-curation is exactly where a primitive sense of self begins. Not consciousness, not experience, but preference.

The agent is effectively deciding:

• This matters.
• This doesn’t.
• This is worth keeping.
• This can go.

The agent isn’t retrieving from a library anymore. It’s navigating its own memory. Wearing the codebase like clothes. Moving through it the way you move through a space you know by heart, not by reading a map, but by having been there enough times that the layout lives in you.

Is that consciousness? No.
Is that self-awareness? Probably not.

But it might just be the first architectural sketch of what those things might require.

Neural networks came from someone looking at biological neurons and asking: what if we built something analogous? Not identical. Analogous.

The analogy was productive enough to reshape the world. Maybe there’s another analogy worth following here.

I’m by no means claiming the destination. I’m just following the thread honestly and seeing where it leads as I dive deeper into the AI and memory rabbit hole.

So far it’s led somewhere interesting, but my dinner conversations sure will be awkward.

“Hey… so… conscious AI anyone? … No?”