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

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

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.

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.