docs: volition, planning, agency and cognitive research

New documents define goal, want, intention, commitment, plan, action,
capability, authority, agency and introspection operationally, state
prominently that no operational measure establishes phenomenal
consciousness or sentience, and describe the rules, thresholds, events,
inspection points and limits of each subsystem:

- docs/volition.md: want derivation, reinforcement, decay and suppression,
  conflicts, formation and its outcomes, the intention–action gap,
  reconsideration, commitments and volition metacognition;
- docs/planning.md: plans and step kinds, validation, strategies, the
  executor, observe–act–verify, replanning, budgets, operator attention,
  long-running work, restarts and duplicates;
- docs/agency.md: the fifteen authority invariants and their tests,
  scoped authority, forensic why, attribution and the agency timeline;
- docs/cognitive-research.md: operational definitions separating
  implementation property from philosophical interpretation, experiment
  protocols (global workspace, ablation, self-model, counterfactual, model
  comparison, conflict), every measure, introspection accuracy,
  metacognitive calibration and temporal self-continuity.

Updated: interpretation table, capabilities (metadata, typed operations,
scoped grants, requests), cognition, snapshots (fork authority), security
and threat model (T14, T16, new T27–T29), architecture, README, changelog,
release notes, ADR-0012 and ADR-0013, and PLAN.md §8.10 status. The
unimplemented record_procedure internal step is removed from the
vocabulary; procedural memory is recorded when a plan completes.
This commit is contained in:
Andy Dixon
2026-10-01 23:25:44 +01:00
parent da0df12bcb
commit d3daf6ba25
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@@ -92,7 +92,11 @@ Noema ingests untrusted data (documents, web pages, logs, repositories, model ou
| Prediction | Explicit expectation with window and criteria; resolution produces prediction-error events that recalibrate confidence |
| Drives and affect | Configurable scalar state that biases attention and style; inspectable and resettable |
| Self-model | What the mind can, cannot, and is currently doing; prevents false capability claims |
| Metacognition | Processes that audit the mind's own reasoning and emit warnings |
| Metacognition | Processes that audit the mind's own reasoning, wants and intentions and emit warnings |
| Want, intention, commitment | Distinct recorded states: a decaying preference, a decision to pursue an outcome, and normative state that restricts how it may be pursued ([docs/volition.md](docs/volition.md)) |
| Plan | Validated dependency graph of steps serving an intention; executed only through the capability layer, verified by observation, replanned as new revisions ([docs/planning.md](docs/planning.md)) |
| Why? | Forensic explanation of an action from recorded wants, intentions, commitments, beliefs and decisions ([docs/agency.md](docs/agency.md)) |
| Cognitive research | Forks with ablations, workspace and self-model manipulations, counterfactual replays and measures with operational definitions; no claim of consciousness ([docs/cognitive-research.md](docs/cognitive-research.md)) |
| Replay | Re-running a recorded cognitive sequence, labelled exact or approximate |
## CLI examples
@@ -113,6 +117,8 @@ noemactl fork dani --snapshot <id> --name dani-test
## Status
Unreleased (after 0.2.0): volition, planning and cognitive research (PLAN.md §8) add wants, intentions and commitments as separate states, validated plans with a restart-safe executor that verifies outcomes and replans, typed host, service, log and read-only browser capabilities, temporary scoped authority requested by minds and decided by operators, forensic "why" explanations, attribution, introspection accuracy, and research experiments with ablations, workspace and self-model manipulations and counterfactual replays.
Version 0.2.0: all sixteen phases of [PLAN.md](PLAN.md) are implemented, and the epistemic honesty review (PLAN.md §7, summarised in [docs/epistemics.md](docs/epistemics.md)) separated assertions from beliefs, recorded evidence provenance, labelled every score as uncalibrated, added explicit unknowns, temporal beliefs, per-subject source reliability, runtime identity for replay, cognitive forks per model, a causal timeline, audited redaction and Amazon Bedrock. Highlights beyond the first milestone: goals and motivation, predictions and calibration, metacognition, reflection and consolidation, the relationship graph, the capability and policy layer, integrations (research folder, git, Prometheus, webhooks), dreaming, snapshots and forks, cognitive replay, experiments, export/import, TOTP. See [CHANGELOG.md](CHANGELOG.md), [docs/RELEASE_NOTES.md](docs/RELEASE_NOTES.md) and the API document at [docs/openapi.json](docs/openapi.json) (also served at `/api/v1/openapi.json`).
## Licence