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
18 changed files with 841 additions and 18 deletions
+18 -3
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@@ -5,8 +5,9 @@
A **snapshot** is a JSON archive of a mind's state at a point in its history:
identity, personality, configuration, workspace and working memory, drives and
affect, goals, beliefs (with evidence, versions, alternatives, links), memories
(with relationships), predictions, entities, corrections, policy rules (kept by forks, never imported from archives) and
conversations. It records the event sequence number at capture and a SHA-256
(with relationships), predictions, entities, corrections, policy rules, conversations,
and wants, want conflicts, commitments, intentions, plans, plan steps and the
volition decision ledger. It records the event sequence number at capture and a SHA-256
checksum. Cognitive events are **not** copied.
A **fork** restores a snapshot into a new mind. Every row id is remapped, so
@@ -15,6 +16,13 @@ pointing at the source's immutable history, which is how the past before the
fork is shared by reference (`forked_from_mind`, `forked_from_snapshot`,
snapshot `event_seq`). After the fork the two minds diverge freely.
**Authority is not inherited.** A fork receives no policy rules unless the
operator asks for them explicitly (`inherit_policies`, audited), and an
import never restores them. Work inherited mid-flight is stopped in the
restore transaction: open plan steps are blocked with their approval and
request ids cleared, open plans blocked and live intentions suspended.
Approvals, grants and executions stay with the source mind.
**Compare** (`/minds/{a}/compare?with={b}`, `noemactl compare`) is
deterministic: counts, mean confidence, belief-by-belief differences keyed on
the normalised proposition, personality and configuration field diffs, and
@@ -91,7 +99,14 @@ an archive of the subject). The subject stays for comparison with the
baseline.
Different models are compared by changing role routing between runs; the
routing in force is recorded in each result. The seed is recorded with every
routing in force is recorded in each result.
Research experiments add protocols (global workspace, ablation, self-model,
counterfactual, model comparison, conflict), ablations and workspace
overrides in forks, self-model overrides, counterfactual replays that omit
recorded events, per-variant volition, plan, downstream and introspection
measures, and reproducibility against the previous run; see
[cognitive-research.md](cognitive-research.md). The seed is recorded with every
stimulus for provenance; deterministic code needs no seed, and model
providers do not honour one reliably.