Andy Dixon
d3daf6ba25
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.
27 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
27 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
# ADR-0012: Wants, intentions and commitments as separate recorded states
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Date: 2026-09-15
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Status: Accepted
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## Context
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Until 0.2 a request mapped straight to a capability invocation, and goals were the only motivational record. Nothing recorded that the mind wanted something, whether it decided to pursue it, what normative constraints applied, or why a strong want led to no action. Explanations of behaviour would have had to be reconstructed after the fact, which is exactly the fluent, unsupported self-description Noema is meant to avoid.
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## Decision
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- Keep four states distinct, in their own tables with their own events: **wants** (preference with origin, decaying strength, urgency, optional means), **intentions** (decision with sources, expected result, priority, status and blocked reason), **commitments** (do/refrain over matched actions, optional "unless approved", weight from kind, due, expiry, revocability) and **actions** (what the capability layer recorded).
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- Derive wants, resolve conflicts, form intentions, check commitments and reconsider intentions with pure Go functions over plain inputs (`internal/volition`), and store every choice, including non-formation, with its terms in an append-only decision ledger.
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- Let attention gate formation: an `intend` candidate competes for the workspace, so what the mind decides to pursue depends on the same competition as everything else, and ablations of attention or the workspace are measurable.
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- No fixed hierarchy between wants and commitments. Conflicts are resolved by recorded scores in which commitments contribute normative weight, goals priority and urgency scales strength. Value-derived wants (caution, privacy) oppose actions explicitly and can constrain an approach to the approved route.
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- Commitments restrict only. A refrain-unless-approved commitment sets `RequireApproval`, turning ALLOW into ASK; nothing in volition can loosen a decision.
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- Represent the intention–action gap: a blocked intention names what it waits for, and a subordinate intention records the waiting (obtain approval, obtain access).
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## Consequences
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- "What did the mind want, which wants conflicted, which won and why" is a query, and so is "why did it not act".
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- Formation weights are hand-set; they are recorded, not claimed to be right, and can be studied with experiments.
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- More events and rows per interaction; thresholds, reinforcement, decay and a cap on active wants bound accumulation.
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- Explicit request recognition is literal English; other requests produce wants without means.
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## Alternatives considered
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- Asking a model whether to act: rejected; decisions about pursuit and constraints must be deterministic and replayable.
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- Commitments as policy rows: rejected; policy is authority outside cognition, commitments are cognitive state and must never grant.
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- A single "intent" record with flags: rejected; the distinctions (wanting without intending, intending without authority) are the point.
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