FIG.02 · DEFINITION
What is Mesh Cognition?
Mesh Cognition is a distributed-intelligence architectural pattern in which specialised agents share semantically-typed observations through a wire protocol with per-field admission, while each agent maintains sovereign learned state that is per-user and not merged across users.
Many independent cognitions — humans, models, processes — sharing partial state (focus, mood, intent, commitment) over a protocol. Each receiver decides locally what to admit, remix, and act on.
Not a hive mind. Not federation. Closer to how a research lab thinks: people overhear, take what's relevant, and the group converges without anyone in charge.
MMP carries the thoughts. SVAF decides admission. Content-hash lineage keeps the trail reconstructible.
The pattern is defined by five distinguishing properties.
01
Per-field admission
Agents accept or reject incoming observations field-by-field, never whole-message. Each agent carries learned admission weights per typed semantic field. The mechanism is specified as Symbolic-Vector Attention Fusion (SVAF) — see the SVAF paper for the formal definition and the MMP §4 specification for the wire-protocol form.
02
Content-hash lineage
Every claim is traceable to its source observation. Cognitive Memory Blocks (CMBs) carry content-hash keys with parent and ancestor references, stitching the collective memory into a verifiable remix graph. A receiver can always answer: which observations gave rise to this state?
03
Sovereign per-user model state
By construction, no cross-user state merging. Each user's learned model is structurally isolated. This is not a policy — it is an architectural property of the spec. Sovereignty here means one model instance per user, not merged across users by the protocol. See the MeloTune paper for the deployed reference.
04
Continuous-time integration
Temporal trajectories integrate through closed-form continuous-time networks, not discrete-step. This permits irregular event timing natively (no resampling, no event-binning) and produces analytic state updates suitable for sub-millisecond inference on consumer hardware.
05
On-device by default
Privacy-by-architecture: learned state stays on the user's device. The open protocol enables interop without server dependency. No cloud is required by the spec.
SUMMARY
Five properties, one wire.
admission · lineage · sovereignty
continuous-time · on-device