noema/docs/beliefs.md

Belief system

A belief is a proposition the mind holds with an explicit, evidence-derived confidence and a status. Beliefs are never edited in place: every change appends a belief_versions row (append-only trigger) and an event.

Structure

Table	Contents
beliefs	proposition, optional subject, epistemic kind, status, confidence, prior, version, source, origin event, operator-pinned status
belief_evidence	typed references (event, memory, belief, prediction, operator, note) with direction for/against, weight (how much it bears on the proposition), credibility (trust in the source), retracted flag
belief_alternatives	competing explanations kept alongside (open, dismissed, promoted)
belief_links	contradicts / supports / alternative_to / derived_from between beliefs
belief_versions	append-only history with the confidence breakdown and the event that caused each change
corrections	operator statements: belief wrong, memory inaccurate, do not infer, entity same/different

What the numbers mean

Every numeric epistemic value in Noema has one defined meaning. None of them is a calibrated probability unless the page says so.

Value	Range	Meaning
epistemic score (confidence on a belief)	[0.02, 0.98]	the deterministic output of the arithmetic below over the recorded evidence: a ranking of how well supported a proposition is given what this mind has seen and how it weighs it. It is comparable between beliefs of one mind; it is not "an 83 % chance of being true".
calibrated estimate	[0, 1] or absent	the observed hit rate of this mind's resolved predictions whose stated confidence fell in the same range as the score, shown only when at least 20 predictions have been decided in that range. Predictions are the one place a score meets reality, so they are the only empirical basis offered.
prior	(0, 1)	the starting score for the epistemic kind before evidence (hypothesis 0.25, claim 0.5, fact 0.8, …).
weight (evidence)	(0, 1]	how strongly a piece of evidence bears on the proposition, set by the producer: an emphatic first-hand assertion weighs more than a hedged second-hand one; a prediction miss weighs 0.5.
credibility (evidence)	[0, 1]	how much the source is trusted for this row: the trust level of the channel (operator 0.95, user 0.85, system 0.9, tool 0.8, source 0.7, low 0.4), adjusted by the source's recorded reliability in the belief's domain where enough history exists.
contribution (family)	≥ 0	what one independent source adds after repetition and derivation discounts.
diversity	[0.6, 1]	the multiplier on support that reflects how many independent families agree.
interpretation confidence (assertion)	[0, 1]	how sure the deterministic reading of an utterance is (who is attributed, what stance, whether it was sarcasm or a hypothetical). It is about understanding the speaker, not about the world.
primary uncertainty	text	the deterministic reason the score should be doubted most: a single family, second-hand only, conflicting evidence, little evidence, or an unclear reading.

Confidence arithmetic

Confidence is never typed in by a person or produced by a model. It is:

value(e)      = weight × credibility                       for each live evidence row e
family(e)     = the independent source e ultimately rests on (an actor, an integration, an operator, a prediction)
contribution(family) = strongest primary item + ¼ × each further primary item, capped at 1.5 × the strongest
                       (if the family has no primary item: its strongest derived item alone)
for           = Σ contribution over supporting families
against       = Σ contribution over opposing families
diversity     = 0.6 + 0.4 × min(1, (supporting families − 1) / 2)
confidence    = sigmoid( logit(prior) + 1.5 × (for × diversity − against) )   clamped to [0.02, 0.98]

• The prior depends on the epistemic kind: hypothesis 0.25, assumption/opinion 0.4, claim 0.5, observation/memory 0.6, fact 0.8.
• Families are the unit of independence. Five messages from one person, the episodes they became, the semantic memory consolidated from them and an inference drawn from that memory are all one family: they carry one person's information however many times it has been re-expressed.
• Derivations say how a row relates to its roots. Primary derivations bring information in from outside the belief system: direct, assertion, operator, external, prediction. Derived ones re-express it: consolidation, inference, reflection, dream, retrieval. Derived rows never add weight to a family that already has a primary row, which is what stops recursive cognition inflating confidence.
• Repetition within a family is worth a quarter per extra item and never more than half again in total, so a single feed cannot manufacture certainty (threat T4), while three genuinely independent families can.
• Diversity counts families, not rows.
• Absolute certainty is unreachable; the bounds are deliberate (spec §10).

Every evidence row records its derivation, family, root_ids (the originating events or memories) and a provenance_status. Rows written before provenance existed are marked legacy_unknown with family = source; no ancestry is invented for them. The breakdown (prior, per-family contributions, for, against, families, diversity, log-odds, formula, notes) is stored with every version and shown on the belief page under "Independent sources".

Assertions as evidence

Statements people make reach beliefs only through assertions (docs/conversation.md). An assertion evidence row carries the attributed actor as its family, the source message as its root, and a weight that already reflects hedging, reporting and interpretation confidence. Nothing is silently upgraded: a claim stays a claim until evidence from another family arrives.

Status

Statuses: unknown (recorded, but no live evidence for or against), hypothesis (a proposal awaiting evidence), tentative, likely, accepted, contested (real evidence on both sides), rejected (evidence or an operator pushed it low) and superseded (replaced by a corrected proposition).

Absence of evidence

Lack of evidence never collapses towards "false". A belief whose evidence has all been retracted, or that was recorded without any, becomes unknown and its score is not quoted; introspection answers "I do not know whether X". A belief is rejected only when evidence against it, or an operator, drove its score below 0.15. Hypotheses are the one exception: they carry the hypothesis status until evidence arrives because they are proposals by construction.

Derived from the breakdown unless an operator pinned it:

• contested when both sides carry real weight (against ≥ half of the discounted support) and confidence is mid-range;
• rejected below 0.15; hypothesis for hypotheses without support or below 0.5; tentative below 0.7; likely below 0.85; accepted above;
• superseded when replaced by a newer proposition.

Temporal scope

Every belief has a temporal_scope: persistent (a fact without an interval: "atlas is the primary host", "Andy prefers Go"), transient (a state that can change: "the door is open", "server A is down") or unknown when the deterministic classifier (ClassifyScope) cannot tell. Transient beliefs record observed_at and valid_from.

When a newer belief conflicts with an older transient one and was observed at least a minute later, the older belief is not contested and not weakened: its valid_until is set to the newer observation, its status becomes superseded with a version and a belief_updated event saying "state changed", and a supersedes link joins them. "The door was open at 10:00" stays true of 10:00 when the door is closed at 10:05. Conflicting reports of the same moment, and conflicts between persistent propositions, are contradictions as described below. Introspection lists superseded states as "Earlier: … (true from … until …)".

Contradictions

On creation and on gaining support, a belief is compared with the mind's live beliefs. The deterministic pass detects the same content with flipped polarity (negation words plus token Jaccard ≥ 0.6). A hit emits contradiction_detected, links both beliefs, and makes each counter-evidence for the other weighted by the other's confidence, so both move towards contested until more evidence arrives. Paraphrase-level judgement is added by an LLM-assisted process once providers exist; it can only propose, and the same arithmetic applies.

Hypothesis generation

The associate process proposes causal hypotheses when two notable observations occur within a window ("deployment … may have caused: latency alert"). Each observation is weak evidence (weight 0.15) so the belief starts as a hypothesis around 0.3–0.4; independent support is needed to move it. Alternatives ("coincidence", "a third factor") are recorded automatically.

Corrections

• This belief is wrong pins the status to rejected, adds operator counter-evidence, records a belief_wrong correction and a belief_retracted event. History is kept.
• Do not infer this again stores a do_not_infer correction; future creations of a matching proposition (token Jaccard ≥ 0.7) are refused and logged as metacognition.
• This memory is inaccurate retracts the memory and marks belief evidence citing it as retracted; affected beliefs are re-evaluated with a belief_updated event.