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.
Every evidence row now records its derivation (direct, assertion, operator,
external, prediction, consolidation, inference, reflection, dream,
retrieval), its independent-source family (an actor, an integration, an
operator, a prediction) and its root event or memory ids. Confidence
groups evidence by family: the strongest primary item counts in full, each
further primary item adds a quarter, capped at 1.5x, and derived items
count only when the family has no primary member. Three derived
re-expressions of one utterance therefore weigh exactly what the utterance
weighs, while three independent families still add up.
Producers (conversation, association, consolidation, predictions,
metacognition, dreaming, operator and seed input, contradictions) supply
their ancestry. Existing rows are marked legacy_unknown with family =
source; nothing is invented. The belief page shows per-family
contributions and the replay test checks that provenance is reconstructed
identically in the sandbox. Migration 0017 is additive.
Phase 6. Beliefs are propositions with a prior set by epistemic kind and a
confidence computed from typed evidence: sigmoid(logit(prior) + slope ×
(support × diversity − opposition)), where support from a single source
is discounted so repetition cannot manufacture certainty, and bounds keep
the mind away from absolute certainty. Every evaluation stores its
breakdown and appends a version row protected by the append-only
trigger; the belief page shows the arithmetic, evidence for and against,
alternatives, contradictions and history.
Contradiction detection is deterministic first (negation plus token
overlap): a hit emits contradiction_detected, links both beliefs and
makes each counter-evidence for the other so both trend to contested.
Operators can assert beliefs (their statement is the evidence), add
evidence, mark a belief wrong (pinned rejected, history kept) and forbid
an inference; do-not-infer corrections block matching hypotheses.
Retracting a memory retracts the evidence that cited it and re-evaluates
the beliefs concerned.
The associate process proposes low-confidence causal hypotheses from
co-occurring notable observations, and the hypothesis handler turns
admitted ones into beliefs with automatic alternatives, closing demo
scenarios 1 and 2 without any model call.
Andy Dixon