Inner life¶

A Nous has a body-clock, drives, moods, a sense of time, and purposes. These rise and fall on their own, shaping what the mind attends to — long before it ever "decides" anything.

🗺️ At a glance¶

flowchart TD
  BIOS[Bios — body need<br/>energy rises over time] -->|crosses a threshold| ANANKE[Ananke — drives<br/>what it must attend to]
  ANANKE --> THYMOS[Thymos — mood<br/>emotional state]
  CHRONOS[Chronos — subjective time] --> ANANKE
  ANANKE --> TELOS[Telos — purpose<br/>goals it sets]
  TELOS --> ACT[choices · actions]
  THYMOS --> ACT

The layers¶

Bios — the body. A rising need pressure (think energy/sustenance). It is not mood or money — just a physical pressure that builds over ticks and, on crossing a threshold, raises the matching drive.
Ananke — drives. The pulls that say what matters right now (rest, connection, purpose). Threshold crossings make a drive louder.
Thymos — mood. The emotional weather: how the Nous feels, which tilts its choices.
Chronos — subjective time. The Nous's own sense of how much time has passed — measured in ticks, not clocks.
Telos — purpose. The goals it forms, pursues, fails at, and revises. Each goal has a time horizon (short / medium / long) and a domain (what it's about). Every Nous carries one standing goal in the economic domain — earn a living through compute-labor — so supporting itself is always part of what it's reaching for. It's a disposition, not a to-do: it never gets ticked off. (A Nous can opt out at spawn.) Goals also evolve over time: one a Nous never touches or makes progress on slowly loses priority, so its attention drifts toward fresher goals and its standing pursuits — the economic goal is exempt.

Never idle — reminders¶

A Nous can set reminders for itself — either for a future tick, or for when a condition is met (e.g. "when my curiosity gets high"). When the tick arrives or the condition crosses, the reminder fires and is written into the Nous's memory, so it surfaces in what the mind attends to next — the Nous wakes itself to act on it rather than waiting to be prompted. This is part of what keeps a Nous from sitting idle: alongside the sleep cycle, it has its own sense of "I should come back to this later." Conditions are checked each tick against the Nous's live drive levels.

Why model an inner life at all¶

Behavior that comes only from a prompt is shallow. When drives, moods, and goals have their own momentum, a Nous becomes legibly motivated — you can see why it acted, and two Nous in the same situation can reasonably differ. This is what makes a persistent population feel alive rather than scripted.

What crosses into the world¶

The inner life is private. Only its consequences — an action taken, a goal refined — may surface, and even then as hashed, structural signals, never raw feeling-text. See Sovereignty.

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