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.
docs/interpretation.md gains a table giving each word the interface and
generated text use (believes, confidence, knows, remembers, attends,
curious, wants, feels, expects, trusts, understands, reflects, dreams,
self-model, metacognition, decides) its operational meaning: the stored
state it names, the rule that changes it, where to inspect it and what it
does not mean. docs/memory.md no longer describes a memory's confidence
as "how likely the content is true"; it is the epistemic score defined in
docs/beliefs.md.
Foundation for the persistent, inspectable cognitive runtime: README,
implementation plan with phases and risk register, architecture,
security model, threat model, contributing guide, eight ADRs covering
the global workspace, event immutability, memory representation, LLM
abstraction, capability system, authentication, frontend and storage.
Includes Makefile, env example, compose stack (pgvector) and Dockerfile
skeleton, plus a record of the development environment assumptions.
Andy Dixon
andy