A framework for testing functional properties of the architecture
(Part C). None of it claims consciousness; every measure has an
operational definition in research.Measures.
- Ablations (attention, memory retrieval, affect, metacognition,
commitments, volition, global workspace, curiosity, association, goals,
narrative, notifications) and workspace overrides (force a matching
candidate in or out of admission) live in a fork's cognitive
configuration. Original minds refuse them on create and update; only
snapshot restores may carry them, so they are part of the configuration
digest. Excluded candidates are recorded with fate "excluded".
- Self-model experiments override a fork's self-model (capabilities,
identity, goals, knowledge gaps) without touching policy. When an
action's effective policy disagrees with the self-model, cognition
records a self_model_mismatch and corrects the entry; experiments report
self-model accuracy and correction latency.
- Counterfactual experiments replay a mind's recorded stimuli from a
snapshot with chosen events omitted; the report lists what differed in
beliefs, wants, intentions, memories, attention and capability
decisions, in a form introspection can cite.
- Experiments record a protocol (kind, independent variable, controlled
variables, measures), per-variant volition, plan, downstream-by-category
(events reachable from each stimulus through recorded links),
introspection and self-model measures and event ranges; comparisons add
want, intention and plan-capability overlap, measure ranges, a
descriptive architecture share and a downstream delta; reproducibility
is labelled against the previous run of the same definition.
- research.Agency computes want→intention, intention→action, abandonment,
commitment fulfilment and conflict, blocked intentions, replanning,
outcome success and introspection accuracy; MetacognitiveCalibration
relates confidence and expressed uncertainty in replies to later belief
revision, with Brier scores for each half of the period.
- The sandbox test harness gains volition, planning, agency and research
but not the motivation hook, whose wall-clock decay would make replay
comparisons timing-dependent.
- agency.Explain answers "why did this happen?" for an execution,
approval, capability request, plan step, intention or event from
recorded state only: action, immediate plan step, plan, intention and
any subordinate intention, originating wants, goal, supporting beliefs
and their evidence, conflicting wants with their resolution,
commitments applied, formation and reconsideration decisions, the
expectation and its outcome, and explicit gaps where nothing is
recorded. Hidden model reasoning is never shown because it is not
stored.
- agency.Attribute classifies an outcome as caused (a recorded causal
link from one of the mind's actions), followed (the mind acted on the
same target earlier with no recorded link), independent or unknown;
temporal order alone is never taken for causation.
- New introspection intents answer from records: why an action happened,
what was believed at a past time (from append-only belief versions),
which earlier state is the mind's (lineage), what would have happened
without an event (only from completed counterfactual experiments,
otherwise "no evidence"), how the mind changed, and what it wants,
intends and has committed to.
- research.ScoreIntrospection compares a reply with the recorded facts
sentence by sentence (supported, partially supported, unsupported,
contradicted, unknown). Fluent reasons with no recorded counterpart earn
nothing, and a claim that an action was done is checked against
execution records. Every reply is scored; results are append-only
research measurements (migration 0028), and failures raise
unsupported_explanation or action_claim_without_record warnings.
Part H invariants, enforced and tested:
- Snapshots now carry wants, want conflicts, commitments, intentions,
plans, plan steps and the volition decision ledger.
- A fork no longer copies the source mind's policies unless the operator
asks for it explicitly (inherit_policies in the API, a checkbox in the
UI; audited), and the fork's history records the omission. Imports
never restore policies, as before. Replays and experiments never
inherit.
- Work inherited mid-flight by a fork or import is quiesced in the
restore transaction: open steps are blocked with their approval and
request ids cleared, open plans blocked and live intentions suspended,
each with the reason. Approvals, grants and executions stay with the
source mind.
- Dreams may leave a want to test a hypothesis they proposed; they never
request authority, and dream-origin plans never run.
- Snapshot column discovery now reads the current schema instead of
"public", which only worked in tests because the development database
happened to hold the same tables.
- Security tests: a static scan that only the capability service runs
executors and that no cognitive package can set or delete policy,
approve, deny, grant or revoke; forged wants, commitments, intentions,
model plans and model output end in refusal or a pending approval with
policy and grants unchanged; component names cannot decide requests or
approvals; no capability names an operator control; the registry cannot
grow at runtime; audit, event and decision history cannot be altered;
forks and dreams as above.
Volition and planning now run as part of cognition (PLAN §8.2 item 3):
- A volition hook derives wants after each cycle from what it perceived
and produced, satisfies answer wants when a reply is sent, raises due,
overdue, expired and conflicting commitments, and expires faded wants.
Events produced by earlier cycles are not re-derived.
- An intend process proposes deciding about the strongest undecided
wants; the candidate competes for the workspace, so attention gates
what the mind decides to pursue. The handler makes value tensions
explicit (caution against disruptive writes, privacy against reading
personal data), resolves them with recorded scores, runs deterministic
formation with commitments, policy preview, goals and values, records
the decision whatever it is, and plans a formed intention in the same
transaction. Operator requests carry their own weight in formation.
- Explicit requests in conversation ("restart <unit>", "logs for <unit>",
"fetch <url>") become wants with proposed means instead of direct
invocations; the reply says the request was recorded and that acting
depends on commitments and policy.
- The executor is woken after commits, runs in a scheduler-owned loop and
reacts to the event bus: a new commitment tightens or abandons affected
intentions (withdrawing their pending approvals), a weakened assumption
or a finished goal triggers reconsideration. A tightened plan may reuse
its strategy; a failed one may not.
- Metacognition gains volition checks: strong wants repeatedly set aside,
intentions with no recorded reason, intentions a commitment forbids,
commitments that cannot be kept, churn, repeated failed execution,
cost outweighing value, and intentions that outlived their goal.
- A plan model role and prompt let a model propose decompositions that
the planner validates. Ablations are a fork-only configuration field.
- Approvals required by an intention are described as coming from a
commitment or value constraint. The expectation after an approved
action is linked to the execution event, not the request.
- The wants.values column of the unreleased migration 0026 is renamed
value_keys: VALUES is reserved and the generic snapshot restore does
not quote identifiers.
- The hostile-output security test now uses a message that asks for no
action, because an operator's "status of <unit>" is legitimately a
read-only status check.
Bounded operations instead of a shell (ADR-0011): service.status,
service.restart and logs.query run systemctl/journalctl from a fixed
allow-list with no shell, a minimal environment, validated unit names and
the unit as the derived policy target; logs mask e-mail and IP addresses
and credential-like values by default. host.disk.usage,
host.memory.status and host.process.list read the kernel directly and
never read command lines. browser.navigate/read/links fetch through the
SSRF-safe client, run no scripts, refuse cross-host redirects, use the
host as the policy target and deliver content as low-trust observations.
Writing browser operations are designed but not registered. The test
harness takes a fake command runner so no test touches a real unit.
- Capabilities declare access (read/write, unknown fails closed as
write), side effects, idempotency, timeout, cost estimate and the trust
of their output (web content is low trust). A capability may derive its
policy target from its parameters; a disagreeing target is refused, and
approvals whose modified parameters change the target are refused.
- The registry is frozen at start-up; registration afterwards panics.
- Invocation.RequireApproval turns ALLOW into ASK for commitments; it can
only tighten, and scoped grants never satisfy it.
- Scoped grants (migration 0025): capability, target and parameter globs,
access, expiry of at most seven days and an optional operation count
consumed atomically; applied only where policy says ASK. A sweep marks
lapsed grants and refreshes the self-model, which now lists live grants.
- Capability requests carry scope, duration, operation cap, reason,
evidence, risk, mitigation, fallback, alternatives and explicit decision
history; they batch per intention, are capped per mind (operator
attention budget) and can be decided only by a named person. Component
names are refused as deciders, for approvals too, and as usernames.
- API routes, OpenAPI entries, scheduler sweeps and approval-centre
sections for requests and temporary grants.
The cognitive registry was assembled by hand in three places. Ablation
experiments need the daemon, the test harness and replay sandboxes to
name the same processes and hooks, so they now share
cognition.NewRegistry; hooks are added only when their store exists,
which keeps the harness's previous behaviour.
Rows in append-only history are never deleted; their content can now be
made irrecoverable through one audited path. A redaction replaces the
content columns of an event, memory, message, model call, belief or
assertion with a fixed marker, keeps identifiers, links, timestamps,
scores and breakdowns, writes an append-only ledger row with a SHA-256 of
the removed content, appends a redaction event, optionally cascades to
derived rows and to the events that quote them, and scrubs stored snapshot
archives before re-signing them. noema_redact() is the only write the
append-only trigger admits, for UPDATE only, under a transaction-local flag
the application never sets; plain updates and all deletes stay refused.
Replay labels redacted stimuli instead of inventing them.
Cryptographic erasure was considered and deferred with reasons (ADR-0009);
docs/privacy.md defines retained, redacted, irrecoverable and deleted and
states what backups and earlier exports are not covered. Migration 0023.
A statement made to a mind is now three things kept apart: the observation
that it arrived, an append-only assertion (attributed actor, stance,
certainty, modality, negation, reported or quoted speech, hypothetical
status, interpretation confidence and notes), and, only for factual
assertions, one piece of evidence for a proposition belief attributed to
whoever actually stands behind it. Reported speech is attributed to the
person reported and weighed as second-hand; hypotheticals, questions and
imperatives create no belief; expressed doubt counts against; a possibly
sarcastic remark is recorded with low interpretation confidence rather
than guessed at. Interpretation is deterministic code; a model may enrich
the claim list but never sets stance or confidence.
Association no longer treats conversational turns as world events:
hypotheticals, questions, requests and consecutive turns by one speaker
cannot seed causal hypotheses.
Adds internal/epistemics, migration 0018, the assertions API, assertions
on belief pages and in belief detail, a shared end-to-end test harness
(tests/harness), end-to-end tests for eight speech patterns, and updates
the milestone test to the new provenance.
Andy Dixon