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.
Plans turn intentions into revisable dependency graphs (migration 0027):
objective, assumptions, ordered or dependent steps, capabilities,
expected observations, preconditions, risk, estimates, budget,
completion criteria, abort conditions and the alternatives considered.
- Validation owns structure: acyclic dependencies, registered and
unlocked capabilities only, schema-valid parameters, targets that agree
with parameters, read-only checks, a closed set of step kinds and
internal actions. Model proposals are parsed into the same structure;
fields that could carry authority or claim progress are reported as
ignored, and an invalid draft is stored as a draft that never runs.
- The planner prefers deterministic strategies: a direct action verified
by observation, a read-only diagnosis that requests temporary scoped log
access with risk and fallback stated, and an escalation that diagnoses
and informs the operator instead of repeating a failed action. Failed
strategies are not reused; a model is consulted only when none applies.
- The executor holds no state in memory: it claims a step with a
conditional update, acts only through Invoke and RequestCapability, and
records the outcome. Waiting for approval or access forms a subordinate
intention and blocks the parent with the reason. Expectations become
verification predictions resolved from a read-only observation, so an
HTTP-level success is never taken as the outcome; a miss is a prediction
error that weakens the supporting belief and triggers reconsideration.
Replanning creates a new revision, withdraws open requests of the old
one and keeps it as history, within a replan limit. Checks never raise
approval prompts. Budgets stop runaway plans. Preconditions skip actions
when the world already changed. Dream plans and disabled sandbox minds
never act. An interrupted non-idempotent action with no record is
blocked for verification instead of repeated; recorded outcomes are
adopted. Completed plans are stored as procedural memories; a completed
escalation does not count as fulfilling the intention.
- Executions and approvals record their origin; minds may withdraw their
own pending approval requests; Preview reports a decision without side
effects; service.status is allowed by default as a bounded read.
Andy Dixon