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--- name: Familiarity slug: familiarity type: cognitive-state status: running version: 4.2.1 released: "circa 40,000 BCE" maintainer: hippocampus dependencies: - memory - pattern-recognition - exposure - time license: Proprietary (non-transferable, non-refundable) tags: - perception - social - comfort - recognition - hazard ---
The brain's shortcut for deciding something is safe, known, or good, based almost entirely on having seen it before.
Familiarity is a lazy heuristic. When a stimulus arrives, the brain checks it against stored patterns. If a match exists, a low-grade signal fires: this again. No deeper analysis is guaranteed. The feeling of knowing can occur without any actual knowledge being retrieved.
This is important. Recognition and understanding are separate processes that familiarity will happily pretend are the same thing.
The core loop:
Exposure is the only required input. Quality of experience is optional.
| Bug | Behavior | Severity |
|---|---|---|
familiarity_as_love | Long exposure mistaken for deep connection | High |
comfort_as_correctness | Familiar ideas feel more true than novel ones | Critical |
contempt_spawn | Extended familiarity can invert warmth entirely | Medium |
false_memory_leak | Familiar feeling fires on things never actually encountered | High |
The last bug is well documented. You can feel you know a stranger because their face rhymes with someone else's. The system does not flag this as an error.
Q: Is familiarity the same as love? A: No. But familiarity has been shipping itself as a love dependency for millennia with partial success.
Q: Can familiarity be lost? A: Yes. Extended absence degrades it. The cache expires. What returns is a stranger wearing a name you used to know.
Q: Is familiarity always comforting? A: No. Familiar pain, familiar arguments, familiar failure states all run on the same engine. The signal is recognition, not approval.
v4.2.1 Contempt spawning threshold slightly lowered in urban environmentsv3.0.0 Social bonding integration tightened; familiarity now more aggressively impersonates intimacyv1.0.0 Initial release. Wolves recognized. Fire recognized. Adequate.