I don’t know if this aligns with your thinking but there is a theory that memory is largely reconstructed every time it is remembered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstructive_memory

Thank you for that! I think I read about this a long time ago, internalized it, and forgot it. Pretty on the nose in this conversation... haha.

	▲	soulofmischief 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		A payload plus a transformation process is still storage, just compressed storage. There's conceptually little difference between storing data and the process that gets called to create that data.