Goals, drives and affect

Goals

Goals form a tree: an investigation may have sub-goals, a sub-goal may have blockers. Each has a kind, a status (active, completed, abandoned), a priority, progress, an owner (operator or the mind itself) and an origin event. The goal monitor process watches for stalls and blockers and raises them as thoughts; curiosity can create investigation goals from unresolved contradictions; operators create, edit and abandon goals from the interface, the API or noemactl goal. Active goals feed the goal_relevance attention feature, so a mind with a goal about the payments service notices payments events more readily.

Drives

Drives are a closed set of eight named pressures: curiosity, uncertainty_reduction, task_completion, consistency, novelty, social_coherence, exploration and rest. Each has a value, a baseline computed from personality (accuracy raises uncertainty reduction, persistence raises task completion, evidence raises consistency, sociability raises social coherence, curiosity and risk tolerance raise exploration), a floor and a ceiling. Drives move by a rule table in response to events (a resolved contradiction lowers uncertainty reduction; a completed goal lowers task completion; a long quiet period raises curiosity and novelty) and decay towards baseline. There is deliberately no self-preservation drive, no replication drive and no drive to seek permissions; the set is defined in code and cannot be extended at runtime.

Affect

Affect is a vector of ten dimensions: valence, arousal, curiosity, concern, frustration, confidence, uncertainty, engagement, task pressure and load. It is moved by the same rule table (a refuted prediction raises uncertainty and lowers confidence; a contradiction raises concern; repeated loops raise frustration; an operator correction raises engagement) and decays towards a baseline derived from personality. Affect modulates attention weights within bounds: high arousal raises urgency weight, high concern raises contradiction weight, high load lowers novelty weight. Every change is an emotion_changed or drive_changed event with the rule that fired.

What this is and is not

These structures make behaviour explainable ("it attended to the alert because concern was high after two contradictions") and steerable (an operator can reset them or change the personality that sets their baselines). They are not claims about feeling. The interpretation boundary applies in full.

Goals

Goals form a tree (goals) with kind (task, investigation, question, maintenance), status, priority, progress, blockers, owner and origin event. Operators create task goals; curiosity creates investigation goals from unexplained observations, prediction errors and contradictions; reflection (phase 10) adds maintenance goals.

Goals influence cognition through the goal_relevance attention feature: each candidate's text is compared with active goals (token overlap weighted by priority). The goal monitor process raises stalled goals and new observations that touch a goal. Goals never grant capabilities; acting still goes through the policy layer.

Drives

Eight drives with operator-configured ranges: curiosity, uncertainty reduction, task completion, consistency, novelty, social coherence, exploration, rest. Baselines derive from personality traits and values. The set is closed in code; there is no self-preservation, replication or acquisition drive and no runtime way to add one (threat T25).

Drives modulate attention weights each cycle (motivation.Modulate): curiosity scales novelty, task completion scales goal relevance, uncertainty reduction scales contradiction, exploration lowers the pull of current context. The workspace page shows the effective weights next to the configured ones.

Affect-like state

Ten scalars: valence, arousal, curiosity, concern, frustration, confidence, uncertainty, engagement, task pressure, load. They are updated by an explicit rule table (motivation.Rules) from events (contradictions raise concern and uncertainty, prediction errors raise arousal and lower confidence, completed goals raise valence and relieve pressure, and so on), then decay towards personality baselines (half-life one hour; six hours for drives). Changes above 0.1 emit emotion_changed / drive_changed events with the reasons.

This is a functional model, not a claim of feeling (docs/interpretation.md). Everything is visible on the mind overview and via noemactl state show, and operators can reset it to baseline or adjust drive ranges; both are recorded as operator actions.