Formation summed its terms by ranging over a map, so the score could
differ in the last bit between runs of the same state; the volition hook
assessed commitments, metacognition raised repeated-failure candidates and
the forensic explanation listed commitments in map iteration order, so the
events a cycle emits and an explanation's order varied between runs. Each
now iterates in sorted order, as replay determinism (PLAN §1 R3) requires.
An intention's supporting beliefs came from a text search on the target,
and ties on rank and confidence had no order, so a verification miss could
revise an unrelated belief about the same service. Beliefs that mention the
proposed action now come first, and belief search breaks ties by id.
The incident scenario asserts the first support is the belief about
restarting, and waits for the blocked intention and the procedural memory
instead of reading them once.
The full incident scenario now runs against the assembled daemon: an
operator goal becomes a want to reduce uncertainty, an investigation
intention and a diagnosis plan; telemetry is read; logs need authority,
so a scoped request with risk, mitigation and fallback is raised and the
intention is blocked until an operator grants it; the logs are read with
personal data masked and summarised back into cognition; the operator
supplies the judgement that a restart should help; a standing commitment
turns the restart into a request for approval; after approval the typed
capability runs and health is verified rather than assumed; the fault
persists, so a prediction error weakens the supporting belief, the plan
is replanned into an escalation that reuses the live log grant and does
not repeat the restart; once the database is fixed a second approved
restart verifies, the procedure is learnt, and "Why did you restart
atlas-worker?" is answered from the recorded chain and scores as
supported.
Changes the scenario exposed:
- New operator goals are raised by the goal monitor, so a cycle runs and
wants are derived from them.
- Intentions link live beliefs about their action's target, so a failed
expectation is evidence against the belief it rested on and the plan
lists it as an assumption.
- Reconsideration reacts to a plan's own intention only; a subordinate
"obtain approval" intention shares the plan and previously caused the
parent's plan to be closed.
- The harness accepts a clock for the executor's verification windows.
Further failure-mode tests: a retracted assumption replans a waiting plan
away from the restart and withdraws its approval request; conflicting
commitments are raised once in a cycle while both stay represented.
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.
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.
Andy Dixon