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).

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 0.1.0: all sixteen phases of PLAN.md are implemented. 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.