A model of volition that keeps wanting, intending and committing as
separate states (PLAN §8.2 items 1–6, 14):
- Wants (migration 0026) carry origin, strength with a six-hour
half-life, urgency, valence, drives, values, goal, commitment and an
optional proposed means. Derivation is deterministic and selective:
failed predictions, contradictions, operator goals, stalled goals,
questions and requests, and due commitments; drives and configured
values modulate strength with recorded terms; candidates below 0.35 are
not stored; identical subjects reinforce; faded and excess wants expire.
- Conflicts are first-class and resolved by explicit scores with no fixed
hierarchy: urgency scales strength, goals add priority, commitments add
normative weight; an approach opposed by a value-derived avoid want wins
outright only when clearly stronger, otherwise with a constraint or is
deferred. Neither side is discarded.
- Commitments (do/refrain with capability, target, access and risk
matchers, optional "unless approval", due, expiry, revocability) are
checked for due, overdue, impossible, conflicting and superseded states.
They constrain means and never grant authority.
- Formation weighs strength, urgency, goal, commitment, expected utility,
risk scaled by caution, cost, privacy and autonomy; it returns formed or
not formed with a reason (forbidden by commitment, denied, unavailable,
no possible plan, below threshold, capacity, duplicate, deferred), and a
commitment requiring approval turns an action into a request for
approval.
- Reconsideration maps triggers (denied or expired approval, capability or
commitment change, failed step or expectation, weakened belief, budget,
goal completion, world change, operator correction) to keep, block,
suspend, resume, replan, require approval, abandon or fulfil, with
bounded replanning.
- The store records every transition as an event and every choice in the
append-only volition_decisions ledger; fulfilling an intention satisfies
its wants and fulfils its commitment.
- Event vocabulary gains volition and plan categories.
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.
Phase 3. Events are the append-only record of everything a mind does
(ADR-0002). pkg/events defines the closed type vocabulary, categories,
evidence references and the observation payload with explicit trust
levels. The store validates and appends inside the caller's transaction,
publishes to a bounded fan-out bus only after commit, queries by seq
cursor with type/category/source/salience/confidence/time/search
filters, and walks provenance: cause, parents, children, cited evidence,
derived events and correlation groups. Durable per-consumer cursors never
move backwards.
Server-Sent Events streams (per mind and global) subscribe before
replaying history after Last-Event-ID so nothing is missed, apply the
same filter vocabulary live, and heartbeat. Operators can inject
observations tagged with operator trust for demos and tests.
UI: live thought stream with filters and paging, forensic event page
with causal chain and evidence navigation, dashboard important events.
Personality and status changes now leave operator_action events in the
mind's own history. CLI: event inspect/list/tail, observe.
Andy Dixon