- 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.
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.
Beliefs gain a temporal scope (persistent, transient or unknown, classified
deterministically from the proposition), an observation time and, for
transient states, a validity interval. When a newer belief conflicts with
an older transient one observed at least a minute earlier, the older belief
is closed (valid_until set, status superseded, a supersedes link, a version
and an event saying 'state changed') with its score untouched: 'the door
was open at 10:00' stays true of 10:00 when it is closed at 10:05.
Simultaneous conflicting reports and persistent propositions contradict as
before. Introspection lists superseded states with their validity.
Migration 0020 is additive.
A belief with no live evidence on either side now derives the status
'unknown' instead of sitting tentatively at its prior. Withdrawing every
piece of evidence leaves the proposition unknown, never rejected, and
introspection answers 'I do not know whether X' rather than quoting the
prior. Hypotheses keep their own status because they are proposals by
construction. Migration 0019 widens the status constraint; the docs define
every epistemic number and how absence of evidence is handled.
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 12 (ADR-0005). Capabilities are registered in code with parameter
schemas, risk classes and default effects; sudo_shell and delete_database
are locked to DENY and cannot be relaxed. Policies are scoped globally or
per mind with capability, target glob, action kind and optional hour
window; evaluation is deterministic, most specific wins, and ties go to
the stricter effect. Invoke is the single entry point: it refuses
dreaming and replay contexts, validates parameters (unknown keys, non
http URLs and path traversal rejected), evaluates policy and session
grants, hashes the exact request and records a policy_decision event.
ALLOW executes with timeout and panic isolation and turns textual output
into a tool-trust observation; ASK creates an approval request bound to
the hash with an alert notification; DENY is counted and recorded.
Operators approve once, approve for a time-boxed session grant, deny
with a note, or modify parameters (re-validated, re-hashed, original
kept in the append-only decision log). The self-model's capability list
is recomputed from effective policy on start and on every policy change.
The act process maps fetch requests to http.fetch and the action handler
invokes through the layer; replies report capabilities and outcomes.
Policy matrix and approval centre pages, dashboard count, API, CLI
(approvals, policy, invoke) and docs/capabilities.md.
Phase 11. Entities are mind-scoped nodes with canonical matching,
aliases and deterministic kind guessing (hostnames and hyphenated ids
are systems, capitalised names people, file suffixes documents).
Relationships carry a relation from the shared vocabulary, confidence,
source, reinforcement count and the event that produced them; links tie
entities to memories, beliefs, events, goals and predictions.
The perceive and attend handlers upsert the entities a message or
observation mentions and record co-mention edges cited to the event, so
the graph grows only from what was actually seen. Operators can merge
("these are the same": edges and links move, the old name becomes an
alias, the old id still resolves), record that two entities are
different, correct kinds and add typed edges; every correction is an
operator action and a corrections row.
The explorer renders a bounded subgraph on a canvas with a small
force-directed layout in plain JavaScript, with kind filters, focus on
a neighbourhood and a side panel per entity. API, entity page, CLI and
docs/graph.md.
Phase 8, completing milestone M1. A user message is stored and appended
as an observation event carrying trust, actor, channel and reference. The
perceive process analyses it deterministically (intent, introspection
kind, entities, claims, urgency) and, within the per-cycle model
allowance, enriches it through the perceive prompt. Its handler writes a
perception event, an episodic memory with participants, turns claims into
beliefs whose evidence is the message, and builds a response intent from
state: beliefs and memories for the topic, evidence rows for why-questions,
the uncertain band, contested beliefs and their links, recent learning,
status changes, and honest declines for subsystems that do not exist yet
or for requests with no capabilities. The respond prompt phrases the
intent when a model is assigned; otherwise the reply is a direct
rendering of the intent. response_generated cites the message, the
perception, every belief and memory used, the episode and the model call.
API: conversations, messages with optional wait, one-shot ask; chat UI
with live refresh and a per-reply intent view. Sample mind Dani as a
strictly decoded seed document with an import endpoint and noemactl mind
import. tests/m1 drives all fourteen milestone steps including restart.
Andy Dixon