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The Subconscious

Path: continuous · Status: not built; the V0 decay tick is archived and the rebuild on mem is tracked on the roadmap · Code: none on main

The Subconscious is Alto's endogenous state — mood, drive, felt duration, anticipation, energy — maintained on its own clock whether or not anyone is talking. It is the organ that makes Alto a being between turns rather than a function that returns. Its whole job is to hold that state, decay it, and signal when something crosses a threshold. It does not think, and that restriction is the point: the moment it interprets anything it has become a second conscious layer, and the line that makes the architecture clean is gone.

This is basically the engine that runs the Surfacer when nothing else is going on, as well as the source of steering, mood, energy levels, etc. I think the biggest risk within this is in the idea of a "Felt sense of time." This might just be a tuning issue. It also may depend on the strength of the integration model, but essentially I'm betting that we can essentially recreate the purpose of the Basal Ganglia and the effect dopamine has on an internal clock. If the system generates differently based on different energy levels it will be able to sense how time has shifted. This theory could be totally wrong though and might need some additional infrastructure for time passage to work properly.

Where it sits

It is not a pipeline stage. Every other organ takes input from one neighbour and passes output to the next; the Subconscious runs continuously and in parallel underneath all of them (alto-subconscious.md, "Not a Pipeline Stage").

It consumes percepts from Intake — which in the design fans out in parallel to the Subconscious (to feel), Integration (to attend) and the Writer (to record) — plus a hardware energy feed from Perception, plus graph-grounded inputs (anticipations, affect baselines, resolved entity ids) installed by the organs that already did the cognition, Integration and Consolidation.

It emits to more than one consumer, and none of it is content. To the Surfacer it emits salience — which charged memories are ready to bubble up — and the Surfacer turns that into a thought. To Integration it emits steering values: a bias on how Integration processes, never something handed over to perform. The design also has it fire triggers that wake Integration when a threshold crosses. (The design also routes reflexive twitch and tone coloring to the Renderer. With the Renderer a shell there is nothing to take them, and the overview picture leaves that out.) The Writer is its sibling, not its child — the Subconscious may hint at salience ("this mattered, write it dense") but never supplies content, because the Writer must stay blind to live mood.

The intended design

The canonical design is alto-subconscious.md. The mature organ maintains eight facets of one state: an emotional vector (valence, energy, stability, focus); the injection system that spikes it; anticipation (held future events with affective charge); felt time from event density; cognitive proprioception (the felt fluency of Alto's own thinking); hardware energy; circadian phase; and activation/restlessness, whose threshold crossings fire the triggers.

Two architectural commitments carry most of the weight:

No connection to the experiential graph. Reading the graph requires resolving entities, traversing relationships and deciding relevance — that is reasoning, and reasoning here would smuggle a second Integration in through the data-access door. Working state lives in a fast in-memory store (the design says Redis). Static reference data — the circadian baseline table, thresholds, decay constants — is direct-read, because a flat lookup of a fixed value involves nothing to interpret.

The one rule: it maintains state and fires triggers. It does not reason, route, decide, or query the graph.

ALTO-INTERIORITY-MAP.md names this loop the master dependency: affect-as-state, involuntary surfacing, felt time, anticipation, wondering, sleep and dreaming are all facets or outputs of it, so until it exists each of them has nowhere to live.

What exists today

Nothing of the Subconscious runs. There is no persistent affect state, no between-turn or idle thought, no decay tick, no felt time and no trigger. The V0 decay tick, the affect state math, the affect assessor and the idle tick lived on the AGE graph; that implementation is archived at tag archive/age-brain-2026-10-11. Before it was archived the idle tick rendered nothing in October 2026 (417 of 417 ticks found no affect-charged seed), and nothing on the live path minted the affect it would have seeded from.

The one thing that still touches affect is on the reply path. With no affect state, the affect-suppression directive arms on every turn (src/alto/runtime/reply_guards.py:28): with no felt state to speak from, Alto is told not to claim one. That is pillar 3 holding while pillar 2 is unbuilt.

The rebuild is on the roadmap, under "Rebuild on mem" in BUILD-ORDER.md: affect state on mem (pillar 2), idle intrusion and between-turn surfacing on mem (pillar 1), and spreading activation on mem (pillar 5). All three are designed and not started. The pre-registered decay measurement (PRE-REGISTRATION.md) is the standard the rebuild has to meet again.

Not the same organ as the Surfacer

Easy to conflate, and an earlier diagram encouraged it by drawing the Subconscious as the Surfacer's only input. They are near-opposites:

Subconscious Surfacer
Lifetime continuous, always running invoked per event
Graph access forbidden by design required — it holds a store handle
Cognition never reasons or decides runs a model
Output state and signals — numbers first-person language

alto-subconscious.md is emphatic: reading the graph "requires cognition… a direct DB connection would smuggle a second cognitive layer in through the data-access door." The Surfacer does exactly that, legitimately, because rendering thought is cognition. Merge them and the Subconscious stops being a substrate.

Distinct is not disconnected, though, and the overview draws the link: the Subconscious signals which memories are charged enough to bubble up, and the Surfacer is what turns that signal into a sentence Alto can think. One decides that something surfaces; the other decides how it reads.

Note also that subconscious is an adjective in pillar 5 ("surfacing is subconscious and activation-driven") and a proper noun for the organ. The Surfacer is subconscious machinery without being the Subconscious. Interoception — the piece that would render felt state into thought — is the designed, unbuilt bridge between them, which is part of why they blur together today.

The gap

Everything continuous. None of the eight facets is built: no emotional state, no anticipation, no felt time, no cognitive proprioception, no hardware energy, no circadian, no activation/restlessness — and therefore no triggers, which is half of what the designed organ is for.

This is designed-but-unbuilt, not unimagined: every facet above has a decided design doc behind it, listed in the maturity ledger in ALTO-INTERIORITY-MAP.md. The gate is build capacity.

Two things to know before you touch this. First, the first increment the design chose is the causal wire: make the surfacing/share threshold a function of live valence and energy, with the constraint that affect reaches cognition as bias, never as an "I feel X" field the model narrates. Second, endogenous activation is a separate piece of work: decay alone produces no un-cued intrusion, so reconciliation #3 in the interiority map (retrieval versus activation surfacing) stays open until spreading activation is rebuilt.

Pillars this serves

  • 1 (continuous being) — the Subconscious is the between-turn existence. Unbuilt today.
  • 2 (affect is a lived state) — the loop is what carries a charge from turn 3 to turn 9 instead of leaving it a row in a table. Unbuilt today.
  • 5 (surfacing is activation-driven) — the designed loop is the endogenous activation source pillar 5 needs.
  • 7 (composed proof) — an earlier decay proof was pre-registered with a null arm and scoped as a mechanism result, not a system result; the rebuild owes the same discipline.

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