Andy Dixon
7d67745ff8
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.
Noema
Noema is a persistent, inspectable artificial cognitive runtime.
It is an always-running daemon that hosts one or more minds: cognitive entities with their own identity, personality, memories, beliefs, goals, drives, affective state and history. Minds perceive events, compete internally for attention through a global workspace, retrieve and consolidate memories, form and revise beliefs with explicit evidence, make predictions and learn from prediction error, and act only through a policy-governed capability layer. Everything of consequence is recorded as an immutable cognitive event, so an operator can always ask why.
Language models are used by Noema as cognitive service providers for language understanding, concept extraction, hypothesis generation and narrative. They are not the mind. A mind keeps its identity, memories, beliefs and configuration when the underlying model provider changes.
What Noema is not
Noema does not claim consciousness, sentience, self-awareness or personhood. It simulates mechanisms associated with cognition so that they can be studied and used. Behaviour that resembles emotion, curiosity, preference or identity is a property of the model being run and must not be read as evidence of subjective experience. See docs/interpretation.md.
Noema is also not a chatbot with a memory bolted on. A user message does not go straight to an LLM. It becomes an observation, is perceived, triggers memory retrieval, competes in the workspace, is reasoned about, produces a response intent grounded in stored beliefs and uncertainty, and only then is turned into language.
Architecture overview
┌───────────────────────────── noemad ─────────────────────────────┐
stimuli ───▶ │ perception ─▶ cognitive events (append-only) ─▶ per-mind runtime │
(chat,files, │ │ │
metrics, │ cognitive processes (bounded pool) ◀──┘ │
git, hooks) │ retrieval · association · curiosity · prediction · contradiction│
│ goal monitor · metacognition · reflection · dreaming │
│ │ thought candidates │
│ ▼ │
│ attention scoring (deterministic, inspectable) ─▶ workspace │
│ │ broadcast │
│ ▼ │
│ executive: beliefs · goals · predictions · narrative · response │
│ │ actions │
│ ▼ │
│ capability + policy layer (ALLOW / ASK / DENY) ─▶ tools │
│ │
│ LLM providers · embeddings · PostgreSQL (+pgvector) · metrics │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
▲ HTTP API · SSE · web UI · noemactl
Full description: ARCHITECTURE.md. Decisions: docs/adr. Plan and status: PLAN.md.
Screenshots
Captured from a running instance with the sample mind Dani (full set in docs/screenshots).
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Quick start
Requirements: Go 1.26+, Docker with Compose, make.
cp .env.example .env
# set NOEMA_MASTER_KEY (openssl rand -base64 32) and NOEMA_BOOTSTRAP_ADMIN_PASSWORD
make dev
This starts PostgreSQL (with pgvector) in a container, applies migrations, and runs noemad on http://127.0.0.1:8080. Log in with the bootstrap administrator, add an LLM provider under LLM and assign models to the perceive and respond roles, create a mind (or load the sample mind Dani with noemactl mind import configs/minds/dani.json after creating an API token under Account), and open its Conversation tab. Without a model the mind still answers, rendering its state directly.
Configuration
Precedence: built-in defaults → JSON config file (noemad -config path) → environment variables (NOEMA_*) → runtime settings stored in the database and edited in the UI. Secrets come only from environment variables, secret files, or encrypted references; they are never included in exports or rendered back to HTML. See docs/configuration.md.
Development
make tools # staticcheck, gosec, govulncheck
make test-race # unit tests
make test-db # tests that need PostgreSQL
make lint security
See CONTRIBUTING.md and docs/ENVIRONMENT.md.
Security warning
Noema ingests untrusted data (documents, web pages, logs, repositories, model output) and can be granted capabilities that touch real systems. Read SECURITY.md and THREAT_MODEL.md before connecting it to anything you care about. Defaults are restrictive: every action capability starts as ASK or DENY, dreaming can never act, and shutdown is always under operator control.
Cognitive concepts
| Concept | Meaning in Noema |
|---|---|
| Cognitive event | Immutable, typed record of anything that happened inside a mind, with provenance links |
| Epistemic kind | observation, fact, memory, claim, hypothesis, belief, prediction, assumption, inference, opinion. Never collapsed |
| Global workspace | Small, capacity-limited set of currently broadcast thoughts, selected by deterministic attention scoring |
| Working memory | Short-lived, decaying set of active items feeding every cognitive process |
| Memory systems | episodic, semantic, procedural, autobiographical; decay changes accessibility, never deletes |
| Belief | Proposition with confidence, status, evidence for/against, alternatives and version history |
| Prediction | Explicit expectation with window and criteria; resolution produces prediction-error events that recalibrate confidence |
| Drives and affect | Configurable scalar state that biases attention and style; inspectable and resettable |
| Self-model | What the mind can, cannot, and is currently doing; prevents false capability claims |
| Metacognition | Processes that audit the mind's own reasoning and emit warnings |
| Replay | Re-running a recorded cognitive sequence, labelled exact or approximate |
CLI examples
noemactl status
noemactl mind list
noemactl mind create dani
noemactl ask dani "why was atlas slow yesterday?"
noemactl belief list --mind dani
noemactl event inspect <id>
noemactl replay <event-id>
noemactl provider test openai-main
noemactl approvals list
noemactl snapshot create dani
noemactl fork dani --snapshot <id> --name dani-test
Status
Version 0.2.0: all sixteen phases of PLAN.md are implemented, and the epistemic honesty review (PLAN.md §7, summarised in docs/epistemics.md) separated assertions from beliefs, recorded evidence provenance, labelled every score as uncalibrated, added explicit unknowns, temporal beliefs, per-subject source reliability, runtime identity for replay, cognitive forks per model, a causal timeline, audited redaction and Amazon Bedrock. Highlights beyond the first milestone: goals and motivation, predictions and calibration, metacognition, reflection and consolidation, the relationship graph, the capability and policy layer, integrations (research folder, git, Prometheus, webhooks), dreaming, snapshots and forks, cognitive replay, experiments, export/import, TOTP. See CHANGELOG.md, docs/RELEASE_NOTES.md and the API document at docs/openapi.json (also served at /api/v1/openapi.json).
Licence
TBD by the project owner.