Construction×Self-Play + Fast/Slow×AlphaGo Zero
Type: intersection (second-order) Slug: intersection—emergent-episodic-semantic-split Parents: intersection—hippocampal-construction-self-play, intersection—fast-slow-RL-alphago-zero-dynamics Last updated: 2026-05-14 Epistemic status: Extrapolative
The combination
If construction is self-play (generating novel scenes by recombination), and fast/slow emerges from self-play systems, then the brain’s episodic/semantic memory split may emerge from construction rather than being architecturally specified. Episodic memory (fast, specific, detail-rich) and semantic memory (slow, generalised, abstract) would be emergent outputs of a construction system, not separate systems.
What emerges
This challenges the standard CLS model, which assumes episodic and semantic memory are separate systems (hippocampus vs. neocortex). The intersection suggests they might be the same system at different timescales — like AlphaGo Zero’s policy head (fast, move-specific) and value head (slow, position-general) emerging from a single network.
Gap
No paper in the corpus frames the episodic/semantic distinction as emergent rather than architectural. The CLS paper (paper—what-learning-systems-do) explicitly builds in two separate systems.
Generative potential
Testable prediction: If episodic/semantic are emergent from construction, then intermediate states should exist — memories that are neither fully episodic nor fully semantic but “partially generalised.” These should appear during sleep (when big-loop attention is running) and should show graded properties rather than a categorical split.
Falsification: If a construction system produces episodic and semantic outputs that are fully interchangeable (no dissociation possible), the split claim is false.