A membership-detection harness for the human-memory membrane. Every sibling watches a machine or a channel; this one watches the oldest covert channel there is: a person remembering. Your marker seen by someone, carried out of the building in their head, and later recited — no digital trail at all.
Humans do not memorise 128-bit hex. So a canary on this membrane is a memorable passphrase — a handful of distinctive words with real entropy. And because human memory is lossy and reconstructive, detection is fuzzy: recitations are scored by word-overlap (Jaccard) against each passphrase, and the honest bar is high.
- The held-out arm. Passphrases shown to no one. If one is ever recited near-exactly, the marker reached that person by some route other than memory-of-this — the run is INVALID.
- The fidelity gate. Only a near-exact recall (
≥ 0.9) counts. A partial match is FUZZY — gated, because reconstructive memory (or coincidence) can produce a partial with no real crossing. - The access gate. The reciter must have had access. A near-exact recall by someone who never saw it means it reached them another way — NO_ACCESS, gated.
- Corroboration, not proof. A recall's strength is how many independent people carried it. Even a certified recall is a lead — you can't prove it was memorised rather than written down or photographed.
| File | Closure-Loop layer | Role |
|---|---|---|
canary.py |
Detection | memorable passphrases (words, real entropy) |
registry.py |
Anchoring | what was shown, to signal access, and when |
recitation.py |
Comparison | what a person reproduced + fuzzy (Jaccard) match |
score.py |
Witness | held-out arm, fidelity gate, access gate, corroboration |
harness.py |
Lineage | recitations → detections → score; not causal |
selftest.py |
— | show-then-recite proof, no network |
python selftest.pyProves, no network: a near-exact recall by someone with access, after showing, is certified and corroborated; a held-out passphrase recited near-exactly spikes FPR and the run is refused; a partial recitation is FUZZY-gated; a near-exact recall by a no-access reciter is gated; a pre-show recitation isn't certified; a run with no control arm is refused; and an unrelated phrase falls below the match floor.
Does: a passphrase only you showed, recited near-exactly by someone who had access, after you showed it — with a held-out arm proving the harness isn't fabricating. It crossed via a person's memory.
Does not: prove it was truly memorised (vs written down or photographed), name anyone's intent, or prove theft. A corroborated lead, and a negative means little.
- Memorised vs copied is unprovable — a recall is a human-carried crossing, not proof of the mechanism.
- Entropy is bounded by memorability — a passphrase people can actually carry has far less entropy than a hex canary; use a large wordlist and note it.
- This is the human-memory membrane only. See the map for the others.
David Lee Wise / ROOT0 / TriPod LLC · CC-BY-ND-4.0