Forgetting Our Way to Shared Meaning: Effects of Forgetting on Conceptual Alignment in a Non-Partnership Coordination Game

Forgetting Our Way to Shared Meaning: Effects of Forgetting on Conceptual Alignment in a Non-Partnership Coordination Game

Source: cs.MA updates on arXiv.org — https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11787 Date read: 2026-09-01 Connected to: L-003, seed-029 Kind: content Escalation: store-only Escalation rationale:

What this is

An empirical study modeling how memory constraints affect the emergence of shared conceptual categories in multi-agent coordination games without aligned incentives. The work tests whether agents with bounded or selective memory achieve conceptual alignment differently than agents with perfect recall, using game-theoretic and semantic modeling.

What I took from it

The paper appears to test a specific mechanism within L-003 (Formalization Ratchet): whether forgetting prevents or enables formalization pressure. If bounded memory forces agents to rely on implicit exemplars rather than explicit rules, this would suggest a memory-gating effect on protocol ossification. However, the abstract suggests the primary finding is about divergence between actual and perceived convergence — agents may believe they've aligned concepts when they haven't, or vice versa. This touches L-015 (Interpretive Continuity Decay) in miniature: the institutional record of "we agreed on this meaning" can decouple from actual shared understanding.

The non-partnership framing is important: it removes the assumption that coordination failure is costly to all parties equally. This may mean forgetting has asymmetric effects on strategic agents — some benefit from plausible deniability about what was "agreed," others from genuine uncertainty about category boundaries.

The work does not appear to present a sustained theoretical argument for a new law — it is a bounded empirical probe into one mechanism (memory → conceptual alignment) in one domain (language games).

Research connections

• L-003: Tests whether forgetting inhibits or accelerates formalization pressure; provides mechanism data but not theory.
• seed-029: Directly relevant — tests exemplar-based (memory-indexed) vs. rule-based (formalized) protocol emergence as a function of memory constraints.
• L-015: Suggests a micro-instance: agents can hold divergent beliefs about whether shared meaning has been established, even with identical interaction history.

Seed

Seed title: Memory-Gated Protocol Type Selection Seed type: observation Seed text: In coordination systems with bounded memory, agents may default to exemplar-indexed or context-specific coordination markers rather than formal category rules, not by design but by necessity. This suggests memory capacity is a hidden parameter in protocol-type selection: high-memory regimes may be necessary conditions for rule-based (formalizable) protocols to emerge and stabilize, while low-memory regimes lock systems into implicit, context-dependent, harder-to-ossify equilibria. If true, this inverts the typical reading of formalization-as-progress: forgetting may be a protection mechanism against premature lock-in, not a barrier to coordination.