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.
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Snapshots, forks, export/import, replay and experiments
Snapshots and forks (spec §42)
A snapshot is a JSON archive of a mind's state at a point in its history: identity, personality, configuration, workspace and working memory, drives and affect, goals, beliefs (with evidence, versions, alternatives, links), memories (with relationships), predictions, entities, corrections, policy rules, conversations, and wants, want conflicts, commitments, intentions, plans, plan steps and the volition decision ledger. It records the event sequence number at capture and a SHA-256 checksum. Cognitive events are not copied.
A fork restores a snapshot into a new mind. Every row id is remapped, so
the fork never shares mutable rows with its source; references to events keep
pointing at the source's immutable history, which is how the past before the
fork is shared by reference (forked_from_mind, forked_from_snapshot,
snapshot event_seq). After the fork the two minds diverge freely.
Authority is not inherited. A fork receives no policy rules unless the
operator asks for them explicitly (inherit_policies, audited), and an
import never restores them. Work inherited mid-flight is stopped in the
restore transaction: open plan steps are blocked with their approval and
request ids cleared, open plans blocked and live intentions suspended.
Approvals, grants and executions stay with the source mind.
Compare (/minds/{a}/compare?with={b}, noemactl compare) is
deterministic: counts, mean confidence, belief-by-belief differences keyed on
the normalised proposition, personality and configuration field diffs, and
the event-type mix.
Export / import (spec §43)
Export produces the same archive (kind: noema.mind-archive, version: 1,
checksum). Nothing secret is included: provider keys, integration secret
references, API tokens and sessions are not mind state and are never in an
archive. Import treats the archive as hostile: size cap (32 MiB), unknown
top-level fields rejected, allow-listed tables only, row caps, column-name
validation, checksum must match, every id remapped, mind_id forced. Text
inside an archive is data; a prompt-injection string in a memory is imported
as a memory, never executed.
Replay (spec §41)
Replay rebuilds a mind from a snapshot into a disabled sandbox mind,
then re-injects the source's recorded stimuli (perception and operator events
after the snapshot) one at a time, stepping the real cycle code synchronously
until the mind settles. Each step compares the events the source produced
after that stimulus with the events the sandbox produced, ignoring
bookkeeping types and normalising ids and numbers:
| Label | Meaning |
|---|---|
| exact | same events, and every model call was served from a recording |
| approximate | a live model call was needed; the recorded response did not match the request hash |
| diverged | no live model call, yet the deterministic code produced different events |
Divergence is reported, not hidden. Its usual causes are honest ones: the working memory changed between snapshot and stimulus, retrieval scores depend on wall-clock recency, or the code changed since the recording.
Runtime identity and compatibility
Every snapshot, replay and experiment records the runtime identity it ran under: build (module version, VCS commit, whether the tree was modified, commit time, Go version, OS and architecture), schema version (highest applied migration), a digest of the non-secret configuration (secrets and credentials never enter it; it changes only when behaviour-affecting settings change), the mind's personality version, a digest of the policies in force, the LLM role routing (including per-mind overrides), the current version of every prompt, the versions of the deterministic subsystems whose output is compared, and the timezone.
A replay compares its identity with the snapshot's and labels itself:
| Compatibility | Meaning |
|---|---|
| exact-candidate | same build, schema, configuration, routing, prompts, policy and subsystem versions: differences can only come from state, timing or a model |
| different-build | the schema matches but something else differs; the differences are listed. Exact steps are still exact; a diverged step may be a code change |
| incompatible | the schema differs. The sandbox could not be a faithful reconstruction, so the replay stops before running rather than produce a misleading comparison |
Snapshots taken before identities were recorded are labelled as such.
Divergence analysis
The first non-exact step is analysed: which event digests appear only in the recording, which only in the replay, and which components those events belong to (retrieval, attention, encoding, beliefs, association, predictions, goals, response, narrative, motivation, metacognition, capabilities). Components are inferred from event types and labelled as inferred: they point at where to look, not at a proven cause. Live model calls are named as a component of their own, because provider nondeterminism is a real and measurable source of difference, not one to be hidden.
The replaying router serves recorded responses by request hash
(llm_calls.request_hash) and records the replayed call with replayed=true.
Replays run under a forbidden capability context; no action can execute.
Cognitive forks per model
An experiment may declare variants: named sets of overrides, each of which becomes its own fork of the same snapshot and receives the same stimuli. A variant can override configuration, personality and, through llm_roles (role → model id), the model used for each role for that fork only; the router honours a mind's own routing and fails closed if the named model is missing or disabled, so a comparison between providers can never silently fall back to the default. Every fork starts from identical cognitive state, which is exactly what makes the model a replaceable service rather than the identity.
The results carry one entry per variant (subject, routing in force, produced-event digests per stimulus, beliefs, memory and goal counts, expectations, model calls, tokens, cost, capability requests, cycles) and a deterministic comparison: the first stimulus at which any two variants produced different event digests, belief-set overlap and mean score difference on shared propositions, attention overlap (selected-thought digests), and the ranges of memory counts, goal counts, cost and capability requests. Every subject mind stays for the two-mind comparison page. With live models the differences include provider nondeterminism, which is measured rather than hidden.
Experiments (spec §57)
An experiment is a snapshot, optional configuration and personality
overrides, a stimulus script, expectations, a seed and a duration cap. Running
it forks the snapshot into a disabled subject mind, applies overrides, feeds
the stimuli and records: events by type, produced-event digests per stimulus,
subject beliefs, memory and goal counts, expectation outcomes, model-call
counts (live/replayed), the LLM role routing in force, duration and cycles.
Results are stored and exportable (/api/v1/experiments/{id}/export includes
an archive of the subject). The subject stays for comparison with the
baseline.
Different models are compared by changing role routing between runs; the routing in force is recorded in each result.
Research experiments add protocols (global workspace, ablation, self-model, counterfactual, model comparison, conflict), ablations and workspace overrides in forks, self-model overrides, counterfactual replays that omit recorded events, per-variant volition, plan, downstream and introspection measures, and reproducibility against the previous run; see cognitive-research.md. The seed is recorded with every stimulus for provenance; deterministic code needs no seed, and model providers do not honour one reliably.
Operating
- UI: mind → Snapshots (take, fork, download, compare, import on the minds page), mind → Replay, top-level Experiments.
- API:
/api/v1/minds/{mind}/snapshots,/api/v1/snapshots/{id}[/archive|/fork],/api/v1/minds/{mind}/export,/api/v1/minds/import-archive,/api/v1/minds/{mind}/compare/{other},/api/v1/minds/{mind}/replays,/api/v1/replays/{id},/api/v1/experiments[...]. - CLI:
noemactl snapshots,noemactl compare,noemactl replay,noemactl experiments.