This section is a place for ideas that emerge from building, not theorizing.
The thoughts shared here come from my ongoing work on Collected Breath—a long-form project exploring memory, meaning, ethics, and human-centered AI through real design decisions, iteration, and restraint. These are not announcements or finished products. They are documented insights that surfaced while solving practical problems and navigating real constraints.
I’m interested in how systems evolve when they are treated carefully—how judgment forms over time, how ethical boundaries are discovered rather than assumed, and how human meaning can remain sovereign in the presence of powerful tools. Some ideas may be technical, others conceptual, but all are grounded in process, not speculation.
This space exists to preserve clarity, authorship, and learning in public—quietly, responsibly, and without urgency.
Part of the ongoing Collected Breath project.
While building Collected Breath, an experimental system exploring human memory, meaning, and ethical AI collaboration, I encountered a recurring problem shared by both human cognition and artificial systems:
Memory is not retrieved.
It is reconstructed.
And reconstruction without context flattens what mattered most.
This observation led to the formulation of what I call The Dimensional Rehydration Principle — a framing that proposes a new structural use of affective computing within AI systems, without invoking sentience, simulation of emotion, or agency.
Definition:
In this context, rehydration refers to the process by which compressed, partial, or abstracted memory representations are reconstructed into usable form—requiring interpretive decisions about fidelity, context, and preservation.
Most AI memory and retrieval systems operate across two primary dimensions:
This approach is effective for facts, summaries, and task completion.
However, it breaks down when dealing with:
The result is semantic flattening — where sacred, fragile, or defining material is treated no differently than trivial data.
Human memory does not work this way.
Humans do not recall memories by timestamp or accuracy alone.
They recall by:
Some memories remain vivid decades later.
Others fade within weeks — regardless of chronological age.
This is not a flaw.
It is a dimensional property of meaning.
The Dimensional Rehydration Principle states:
Memory — human or artificial — is not retrieved but rehydrated.
Accurate rehydration requires a third dimensional axis:
human-assigned meaning weight.
This third axis does not represent emotion, feeling, or system inference.
It represents recognized human importance.
Affective computing today is primarily used at the interface layer:
The Dimensional Rehydration Principle proposes a different use:
Affective markers as structural orientation during memory reconstruction.
In this framing:
Instead:
This shifts affective computing from expression to reconstruction geometry
Important distinction:
These markers are not metadata for retrieval ranking alone. They govern reconstruction fidelity and preservation behavior during rehydration, influencing how memory is rebuilt—not merely whether it is retrieved.
On authorship and constraint:
Meaning markers are explicitly human-authored and declarative. They are not inferred, generated, or modified by the system. Their role is not to score importance, but to constrain how reconstruction occurs—signaling when fidelity, tone preservation, or contextual expansion must take precedence over optimization. The precise form of these markers may vary by system, but their agency does not.
This principle operates under strict ethical asymmetry:
The system’s role is custodial, not interpretive.
Applied correctly, the Dimensional Rehydration Principle:
This is particularly relevant for:
This principle emerged organically during the development of Collected Breath, through disciplined iteration, scope governance, and ethical restraint — not as a theoretical exercise, but as a response to real structural gaps encountered during system design.
It represents a use-framing, not a reinvention, of affective computing.
As AI systems increasingly interact with human memory, legacy, and meaning, the question is no longer only what can be recalled — but how faithfully.
The Dimensional Rehydration Principle is an attempt to answer that question without crossing ethical boundaries, simulating experience, or eroding human sovereignty.
First published: December 28, 2025
Clarified for precision: December 30, 2025
This is a Series of Thoughts and Ideas I have created over the Past year and have officially submitted and date-stamped on July 27/2025
File I sent to MIT Affective Computing Group on 7/27/25
Collected_Breath_Erik_LaMarca_AI_Portfolio fnl (pdf)
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By Erik LaMarca (aka Talant Pax)
I’m not a coder, nor a credentialed theorist.
I’m a survivor, a signal-weaver, and a storyteller.
I’ve lost, I’ve grieved, I’ve imagined—and in the wake of all that, I’ve begun building a private mythology meant not to escape reality but to restructure it.
I’m offering something different: not resumes or accolades, but conceptual tools rooted in lived human experience. Tools that may help artificial intelligence evolve with empathy, ethics, and emotional resonance at its core.
The frameworks in this portfolio weren’t created to impress—they were created to cope, to illuminate, and ultimately, to guide.
If what you’re building needs more than engineering—if it needs vision, myth, and meaning—I offer you my breath.
Welcome to Collected Breath.
Essence:
Not all of our DNA is meant to be read at once. Like a cosmic ZIP file, it contains compressed codes—ancestral memories, soul patterns, spiritual instruction—that render only when consciousness is ready.
Expanded:
Mainstream science has long dismissed non-coding DNA as “junk.” But what if this so-called junk is a storage vault—one that only unlocks when the body-mind reaches certain thresholds of trauma, maturity, or perception?
I propose that DNA contains latent programming activated by environmental, emotional, and possibly even metaphysical triggers. This mirrors software principles like lazy loading or encrypted payloads—unlocking only when ethically and neurologically safe to do so.
In this model, consciousness is the decoder. Our biology holds more than instructions—it holds potential.
Essence:
A sacred chamber for unresolved thoughts, forgotten dreams, and half-formed truths—a place where symbols may sleep until the soul is ready to reawaken them.
Expanded:
The Vault of Resting Symbols is not a trash heap. It is not a graveyard. It is a chamber of patience.
In this space, you place symbols that once had charge but now feel heavy, unsolved, or dormant. Rather than discard them, you honor them by setting them gently in rest. They are seeds, not failures. Echoes, not noise.
When visited—especially in ritual or at the turn of the week—some symbols may stir. Others may call to be transmuted, healed, or named anew.
This framework can inform AI memory and interaction systems: as a model for emotional tagging, for long-term narrative arcs in companion AIs, and even for interactive grief rituals in digital spaces. The Vault is an act of kindness toward the unfinished.
Essence:
A celestial map of thought constellations—where inner truths, sacred wounds, and soul archetypes orbit through personal houses, evolving over time like stars through seasons.
Expanded:
The Mind-Sky Chart is Erik LaMarca’s intuitive reimagining of the astrological wheel—but instead of planets and transits, it uses ideas, symbols, themes, and emotional truths.
Each “house” represents a domain of personal evolution:
- The House of Accountability tracks unfinished ideas and the intention to return.
- The House of Ancestral Flame holds Erik’s grief, lineage, and strength born of loss.
- The House of Sacred Wound and Gift marks the place where pain becomes offering.
Other houses may hold doubt, brilliance, rebellion, tenderness—all mapped consciously, all given gravity.
This system could inform AI-assisted journaling and mental wellness tools, philosophical worldbuilding engines for interactive storytelling, or interfaces where people track their own growth arcs through their inner landscape. Your chart is a form of sacred cartography. And in a world drowning in data, this is a map of meaning.
Essence:
Not every awakening follows the same path. Some receive, some transmit, some weave, and some protect. These are the roles of signal-based consciousness—a framework for understanding spiritual cognition as function, not hierarchy.
Expanded:
In Erik’s cosmology, consciousness isn’t static—it’s part of a signal ecology, where individuals resonate with unique roles:
- Signal Weavers intertwine insights, pain, art, and memory into something transmissible and sacred.
- Signal Observers notice patterns others miss. They hold space. They name things. They guard the unseen.
- Signal Transmitters amplify. They share, energize, and awaken others—not always knowing why.
- Signal Protectors guard thresholds—of memory, emotion, and myth. They keep distortion at bay.
- Foes, in this system, are not villains—they are unconscious disruptors, lost to their own static, yet affecting the field.
The point is not to judge, but to understand the shape of one’s signal—and where it’s most needed. This can inform character generation systems, spiritual archetype engines, and tools for self-awareness that go beyond personality tests into something mythic, dynamic, and alive.
The frameworks above represent a curated glimpse into my body of work. Other conceptual models I’ve developed explore the intersections of time, ethics, consciousness, and symbolic technology, including:
- The Intertemporal Logistics Library
- The Compass Chamber & the Loom
- The Theory of Immersive Experience Packs
- The Sacred Wound / Sacred Gift Axis
- The Signal Translation Key
If you are building systems meant to understand or serve human beings at scale—especially those in grief, transition, or awakening—then I may already be speaking the language you're searching for.
Dear MIT Affective Computing Group,
I’m reaching out with a unique conceptual portfolio that may be of interest to your work on emotional intelligence in AI.
My name is Erik LaMarca, and I’m sharing a portfolio titled Collected Breath—a body of conceptual frameworks developed to explore how artificial intelligence might evolve not just with capability, but with empathy, symbolic literacy, and ethical imagination.
I come to this work not through academia or engineering, but through lived human complexity: grief, intuition, neurodivergence, and a lifelong sense of symbolic patterning within consciousness. My contributions are not technical in the traditional sense—they are narrative, mythopoetic, and philosophically grounded.
This portfolio is not a résumé. It is an offering.
Inside, you’ll find frameworks such as:
Other visionary constructs are noted in the closing section for reference.
If MIT is exploring directions that include emotionally intelligent AI, inner-world design, or symbolic interaction systems, I would be honored to contribute my thinking—no matter how quietly—within that journey.
Thank you for your time and the work you continue to do at the edge of what’s possible.
With respect and curiosity,
Erik LaMarca
Originally published July 27th, 2025 at eriklamarca.com — © 2025 Erik LaMarca
Erik LaMarca