Andy Dixon
e9c1b25c80
Phase 4 (ADR-0001). internal/attention scores thought candidates as a normalised weighted sum over ten named features with a per-term breakdown, ranked by (score, id) so ordering is total and replayable. internal/workspace holds the capacity-limited workspace (refresh by subject, decayed competition, explained admit/reject outcomes) and the decaying working memory. internal/brain runs one runtime per active mind: debounced wake-ups from the event bus (own output never re-triggers), a settle window so concurrently committing events are not skipped, bounded concurrent Observe calls with per-process isolation and timeouts, deterministic scoring, a loop detector that suppresses recurring thoughts and raises a metacognition warning, executive dispatch by thought kind, and one transaction per cycle whose events are published only after commit. Every candidate, selection, attention shift and broadcast is an event with provenance back to the triggering observation. Operators can run a cycle, pause, resume, reset transient state and change attention weights live; the manager reconciles runtimes with mind status. cognition/attend is the first process: deterministic candidates from external events using an urgency lexicon, novelty against context and trust-based operator priority.
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.
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, create a mind (or load the sample mind Dani with noemactl mind import configs/minds/dani.json), and open its conversation page.
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
Early development. See PLAN.md for phases and progress and CHANGELOG.md for history. Screenshots will be added once the UI stabilises.
Licence
TBD by the project owner.