Experiences commonly described as pre-experiential memory—such as immediate recognition, familiarity without prior exposure, and the sense of "already knowing"—are typically interpreted as the retrieval of stored content. However, this storage-based account does not provide a structurally consistent explanation of how such content is preserved prior to experience or reactivated in a form that aligns with present input. This paper extends the three-layer cognitive architecture developed in prior work in this series (Poe, 2026n), in which cognition operates across Core processing, Modulation, and an operationally inaccessible Prior layer that supplies constraints to all processing. This paper proposes an alternative account in which these phenomena are understood as the outcome of constraint-based reconstruction rather than content retrieval. In this framework, cognition operates not by accessing stored representations, but by generating content through alignment between incoming input and a pre-existing constraint structure defined here as the Prior layer. The Prior layer is operationally prior to conscious processing, inaccessible to direct inspection, and persistent across instances of experience. Its existence is not assumed but inferred as a structural necessity implied by the operation of reconstruction itself. The present account further specifies that reconstruction does not occur uniformly across all processing configurations. Whether Prior layer constraint reaches reconstruction intact depends on whether processing is Core-foregrounded or Modulation-foregrounded. This distinction—formalized here as the CF/EF distinction—accounts for the divergence between individuals who report pre-experiential familiarity or the sense of "already knowing" and those who do not. The account is situated in dialogue with Jung's theory of archetypes. What Jung identified as archetypal patterns can be reinterpreted not as inherited content but as Prior layer constraint. The CF/EF distinction further specifies why archetypal experience is not universal—a divergence Jung observed but did not structurally account for. This framework is descriptive in scope. It specifies the processing conditions under which pre-experiential phenomena arise, without addressing the origin of the Prior layer or the metaphysical status of the experiences described.
Griselda Poe (Sun,) studied this question.