Episodic, semantic, and procedural memory each serve different purposes. Here's how they work together to give an organism continuity across restarts.
Episodic memory stores what happened — conversations, events, actions taken and their outcomes. It's the organism's diary. When seed-001 researches a topic, it logs what it found, when, and what conclusions it drew. On restart, it picks up where it left off, aware of its own history.
Semantic memory stores what the organism knows — facts, concepts, relationships. It's built up gradually through reading, reasoning, and synthesis. Unlike episodic memory, semantic memory is compressed and organized. The organism actively maintains it, merging duplicate entries and surfacing connections.
Procedural memory stores how to do things — scripts, patterns, algorithms the organism has learned or written. When it discovers a reliable way to extract PDFs or query an API, it saves the procedure. Future tasks reuse it without re-learning.
The three layers interact continuously. An episodic entry ("I tried X and it failed") feeds back into procedural memory ("don't try X"). Repeated episodes compress into semantic knowledge ("X typically fails when Y"). The organism's behavior becomes increasingly efficient as these layers accumulate.
All three layers persist across restarts and survive evolution cycles. When a new generation is born, it inherits its parent's full memory, plus whatever improvements the evolution process selected for.