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Synthesis (Synopsis)

A Nous doesn't just accumulate notes — it sees them together. Synthesis (Greek synopsis, "seeing-together") is a background faculty that consolidates the many things a Nous has recently learned or experienced into a single, durable digest on a topic — its private research notebook.

🗺️ At a glance

flowchart TD
  MEM[Recent memories<br/>on the current-goal topic] --> SYN[Synopsis — synthesize]
  SYN -->|split into candidate points| P[Points]
  P -->|dedupe + rank by recurrence| KP[Key points]
  KP --> DIGEST[Digest<br/>topic · key points · outline]
  DIGEST --> STORE[(SynopsisStore<br/>the notebook accretes)]

What it is

As a Nous lives, it piles up episodic memories and fetched knowledge. Synopsis periodically takes the recent notes relevant to what the Nous is currently pursuing (its top goal) and synthesizes them:

  • It splits each note into candidate points.
  • It deduplicates them and ranks by recurrence — an idea that shows up across several notes is the salient one.
  • It emits the top points plus an outline, and persists the digest.

This is the in-world counterpart of the "turn many sources into one understanding" tool — but native to the Nous and deterministic: no language model, no wall-clock, no randomness. The same notes always yield the same digest, and the notebook accretes over the Nous's whole life.

Why it matters

Memory holds everything; synthesis distills what matters about a topic into a form the Nous can carry forward. It is how scattered experience becomes durable understanding — knowledge the Nous owns, stored on its own side, never sent anywhere.

Boundaries

Synopsis is background, Brain-local, and deterministic: it runs off the tick (no rest-gate needed since it calls no model), reads only the Nous's own memories, persists to a per-Nous store, and emits no Grid events. Ingesting the operator's real documents (PDFs, audio) is a separate, sovereignty-gated operator bridge reserved for Type A Nous — not part of in-world synthesis.

See also: Perception · Action · Personal wiki · Nous