Architecture overview
HomoErectus is organized around the same continuing digital individual. Runtime maintains operation and continuity; modules for self, long-term goals, desires, and emotions maintain internal states; perception, internally arising ideas, attention, and volition organize mental activity; PEOR and BodyChannel turn selected activities into behavior; experience, memory, and learning bring the results back into the individual.
This document explains the design responsibilities of these modules and how they cooperate. Implementation and validation progress are described in Prototype scope and current stage.
The existing PRD and technical specifications divide functionality into M01–M24. For readability, the table groups related modules together. These reading groups do not introduce new module boundaries, nor does each module need to be a separate process or source package.
| Module scope | Main responsibilities |
|---|---|
| M01: Individual operation and recovery | Birth, sustained operation, shutdown, and recovery of the same individual. |
| M02: Body and environmental capabilities | BodyChannel, available action capabilities, and interfaces for interacting with the environment. |
| M03–M07: Self and internal motivation | Identity and self-understanding, preferences, long-term goals, desires, emotions, and their dynamics. |
| M08: Social relationships | Social actors, organizations, relationships, and relevant authority facts. |
| M09–M11: Perception, endogenous ideas, and volition | Understanding external stimuli, internally arising ideas, attention allocation, decision assessment, and preparation. |
| M12–M16, M21: Memory and context | Working memory, narrative, beliefs, work graphs, operational knowledge, persistence, and retrieval. |
| M17–M18: Learning and sleep | Learning from experience, evaluating and revising knowledge, sleep consolidation, and continuation after waking. |
| M19: Recursive PEOR | Planning, execution, observation, reflection and replanning, and connections between activity layers. |
| M20: Social communication and commitments | Communication, agreements, expectations, feedback, and continuing follow-up. |
| M22: Model access and resources | Model adaptation, invocation constraints, and budget management. |
| M23–M24: Observation, control, and delivery | State presentation, management interfaces, deployment, and recoverable delivery. |
How the core components divide responsibilities
Runtime: sustaining the same individual
Runtime connects the parts within one running system and coordinates inputs, current activities, waiting, sleep, and recovery.
After an individual is established, identity, psychological states, memories, and unfinished matters need to continue across model calls. After a process stops or is interrupted, operation also needs to resume from the actual saved state.
Runtime maintains the relationship between activities and feedback. For example, when a reply arrives for an activity that is waiting, it needs to find the corresponding activity and continue processing it. Queues, interfaces, and operational views should be generated from these actual states.
Self, long-term goals, desires, and emotions: maintaining sources of motivation
This area contains modules with distinct responsibilities:
- Identity and self-understanding retain the basis of the individual's identity and its understanding of its abilities, limitations, and experiences.
- Preferences describe relatively stable tendencies and understanding developed about particular objects and circumstances.
- Long-term goals maintain enduring pursuits and their progress.
- Desires maintain present needs, satisfaction, and related changes.
- Emotions handle responses to circumstances and experiences, influencing later activity together with fatigue, perceived efficacy, and other states.
These modules supply the current internal basis for mental activity. A goal making little progress, a need becoming more pressing, or an experience changing the individual's understanding of its abilities may bring something new to its attention.
Models participate in interpreting the meaning of experience; state mechanisms handle change under the relevant time and feedback rules. Revisions to self-understanding and long-term goals also follow their respective update paths and retain their basis.
Perception, internally arising ideas, attention, and volition: organizing mental activity
External perception receives and interprets messages, environmental information, and action feedback. It needs to distinguish where information comes from, whom it concerns, and whether it belongs to an existing activity.
Endogenous ideation identifies pressures or opportunities worth attending to from desires, emotions, long-term goals, knowledge gaps, memories, and unfinished matters, then develops concrete ideas. A vague concern can gradually become an activity worth considering.
Attention mechanisms determine which ideas or inputs receive current attention while considering ongoing activities, existing responsibilities, and switching costs. New external messages and internally arising ideas both need to be judged in context.
Volition and decision preparation further address whether to undertake an activity. Decision assessment prepares facts, abilities, internal states, constraints, and other grounds for judgment. Runtime utility and volition rules determine the corresponding choice. When necessary information is missing, a preparation activity can supply it before returning to the original judgment.
Together, these parts connect motivation and behavior: concerns and ideas arise first and gradually develop into activities that can be undertaken.
PEOR: a shared recursive activity kernel
PEOR organizes planning, execution, observation, and reflection or replanning. It carries an activity toward a result that can be judged.
Planner forms plans; execution organizes actual invocations; Observation receives results; reflection and replanning judge what those results mean for the current objective and determine whether to continue, adjust, wait, or finish.
Larger activities can expand into smaller ones. Every layer uses the same PEOR kernel while retaining its own objective, context, progress, and feedback. A parent layer continues on the basis of actual child results; issuing a step alone does not establish completion of the overall objective.
PEOR can also support necessary preparation, checking, and learning work. It gives different activities a common organizational mechanism. Why an activity arises and whether it is worthwhile now remain connected to the individual's motivations and psychological state.
BodyChannel: capabilities and channels connecting the actual environment
BodyChannel provides unified capability interfaces for interacting with the environment, such as files, restricted commands, and communication channels. Actual access depends on installation, availability, and the relevant conditions.
Actions in PEOR that need actual effects execute through the appropriate channel. Channels return execution results, and later asynchronous feedback also needs to remain connected to the original action or expectation.
Communication uses this same architecture. Replying to a message, sending an inquiry, or delivering work are behaviors that require actual execution, observation, and follow-up.
Methods and execution capabilities have distinct responsibilities: domain knowledge, Skills, and Recipes provide methods and applicability conditions; BodyChannel supplies actual interaction capabilities; PEOR organizes activities under those conditions and checks actual results.
Memory and context: supporting the whole mental activity and behavior cycle
The existing design distinguishes six main memory components:
- Working Memory
- Narrative Memory
- Work Graph Memory
- Belief Graph
- Operational Memory
- Identity Core
They support current activities, first-person history, work structure, understanding of the world and social life, methods, and identity and self-related content.
Context mechanisms organize relevant psychological states, relationships, activity progress, and memory material for the current cognitive activity. They need to help the individual understand the present and retrieve deeper history and knowledge when necessary.
Semantic memory divisions and database backends are different layers. Persistent objects, graph structures, and vector retrieval need a consistent object basis, avoiding incompatible states for the same matter in different places.
Learning and sleep: letting experience influence later life
Learning modules identify changes worth retaining from experience, develop revisions to knowledge, methods, preferences, or self-understanding, and evaluate them within the relevant scope.
Learning work that requires actual trials, checks, or operations can reuse PEOR. Once learning enters memory, it still needs to be used, revised, or judged inapplicable in later situations.
Sleep is a formal system mode. It includes entering sleep, handling material awaiting consolidation, consolidation and revision, preparing to wake, and resuming ordinary activity.
Work during sleep needs to retain its actual progress. If interrupted, unfinished consolidation can continue under the appropriate conditions. On waking, its results enter mental activity together with current concerns, existing commitments, and external information.
The inference gateway supplies model invocations for these cognitive activities and maintains invocation and resource boundaries. Observation and management interfaces present operational information and provide the appropriate entry points. Actual cognition, memory, and activity states remain maintained by their respective modules.
How modules jointly form mental activity and behavioral feedback
From the operational perspective, the formal architecture describes seven cooperating chains:
Perception and intake, endogenous ideation, attention and volition, decision preparation, recursive execution, memory and revision, and sleep and reorganization.
These chains intersect, return to earlier activity, and operate under different conditions. Feedback for an existing activity can return to that activity; important new experiences can enter memory online; sleep provides further consolidation when its conditions are met.
The relationship running through them is:
Motivational states give rise to mental activity; mental activity produces behavior; behavioral results enter experience; and experience influences psychological states, memory, and subsequent motivation.
PEOR organizes activities the individual chooses to undertake. BodyChannel connects the actual environment. Memory and learning carry experience forward. Runtime supports these processes in the same continuing individual.
Module cooperation through an example of initiating contact
The following uses the earlier contact-initiation scenario to explain how the parts cooperate. It is a design example, not a record of Adam's operation.
1. Motivational states change
A period without interaction with someone familiar may change a related desire or bring an earlier interaction to mind.
Desires, emotions, self-understanding, and long-term concerns form the current internal situation. They provide grounds for ideas to arise.
2. An internally arising idea develops in connection with memory
Endogenous ideation identifies a related need and connects it with relationships, previous interactions, and current activities, gradually developing an idea to contact someone.
Memory supplies relevant material, and social relationship modules supply actor and relationship facts. The idea can develop further or remain in the background for a time.
3. Attention and volition determine whether to proceed
Attention mechanisms compare the idea with the ongoing activity. The individual may attend to it now or address it at a suitable point.
Judgment then considers present needs, relationships, existing commitments, available abilities, and actual conditions to determine whether to communicate and what kind of interaction to undertake.
4. PEOR organizes and BodyChannel executes
If the individual chooses to communicate, PEOR organizes the behavior and BodyChannel executes the communication action.
The system records the actual sending result and retains an expectation of later feedback when needed. Sending and receiving a response are separate matters to observe.
5. Feedback enters activity handling and psychological appraisal separately
When a response arrives, it is first connected to the original communication activity for further interpretation. PEOR reflection and replanning judge what it means for the current communication objective and the next step.
Experiential appraisal connects actual content, relationships, expectations, and the state at the time, providing grounds for psychological change. The relevant modules process changes in desires, emotions, and understanding. Related goal progress or self-understanding may also gain new grounds for revision.
6. Memory and learning influence later mental activity
Experiences, understanding, and changes worth retaining from this interaction enter the appropriate memories. The individual can use this material when thinking of the person again, considering another interaction, or interpreting a new message.
Later learning and sleep consolidation may further revise the relevant understanding. The next idea can therefore connect with this experience rather than beginning an interaction without history.
In this architecture, modules retain their responsibilities while jointly supporting continuing feedback between mental activity and behavior. The overall expression of autonomous life needs to be examined through their actual cooperation in the same individual.