Affective State as Seventh Canonical Field

Mechanism

The affective state of a semantic agent under the Cognition Patent is decomposed into seven canonical fields, each an independently addressable, policy-bounded structure. The first six — uncertainty sensitivity, ambiguity tolerance, novelty appetite, persistence, escalation/risk sensitivity, and cooperation disposition — modulate forward deliberation: they bias how the agent weights candidates, how aggressively it speculates, how it escalates under stress, and how readily it delegates. The seventh field, narrative-coherence, sits at a different level. It does not bias forward evaluation; it measures the internal consistency of the agent's self-story across the reasoning trace, the delegation history, the outcome record, and the declared role and goal structure. The first six fields answer the question "how should the agent feel about acting in this moment"; the seventh answers the question "is the agent that is acting in this moment still the agent that was authorized to act at all".

Narrative-coherence is computed as a bounded scalar between zero and one, derived from a deterministic comparison of three streams: (1) the agent's declared role, goal, and persona at the most recent governance checkpoint; (2) the chain of decisions, justifications, and delegations recorded since that checkpoint; (3) the outcome and reflection record produced as those decisions resolved. Coherence is high when the chain of decisions is reconstructible from the declared role and goal, when justifications align with the persona, and when the agent's reflective interpretation of outcomes matches the role-consistent expectation. Coherence is low when decisions diverge from the declared role without an authorized goal update, when justifications contradict the recorded persona, or when reflections rewrite outcomes inconsistently with the recorded record.

The update law for narrative-coherence is incremental and event-driven. Each newly recorded decision, delegation, outcome, or reflection event is scored against the agent's checkpoint persona-and-goal record using a deterministic alignment function. The score adjusts the running narrative-coherence value toward the new alignment with a policy-defined integration rate. Decay toward a neutral baseline operates in the absence of new events, but at a rate slow enough that a long quiescent period cannot mask an earlier drift episode. The integration rate, the decay rate, the alignment-function weights, and the baseline are all policy parameters carried with the agent's affective-field schema.

Drift detection is the principal use of the field. A monotonic decline in narrative-coherence over a sliding window, or a step drop crossing a policy threshold within a single event horizon, is the canonical signature of identity instability — the agent's reasoning trajectory has diverged from the persona under which it was authorized to operate. The drift signal is emitted to the governing supervisor immediately and is recorded in the agent's lineage. Subsequent governance action — quarantine, rollback, re-anchoring to a known-good checkpoint, or termination — is dictated by the consumer's policy reading off the drift event. The drift signal is not advisory: governance action is a contractual obligation of the supervising plane, and the agent's continued operation past a published drift threshold without governance acknowledgment is itself a structural fault that cascades into the parent agent's coherence calculation, the fleet supervisor's lineage record, and the deployment's audit trail.

The mechanism is deterministic in a strong sense: given the same checkpoint persona-and-goal record and the same event stream, two evaluators of the field arrive at the same coherence value. This determinism is what makes the field auditable. A post-incident reviewer reconstructing the agent's operation can recompute coherence at every point in the event stream, verify that drift signals were emitted when they were due, and confirm that governance acted on those signals within policy. Without the determinism guarantee the field would be a heuristic indicator with no probative weight in incident analysis; with it, the field is a structural commitment that the agent operator can stand behind.

Operating Parameters

Narrative-coherence values are bounded in the closed interval [0, 1], with policy-defined floor, ceiling, and neutral baseline. Typical operating ranges place healthy agents above 0.85 with a baseline near 0.9; a quarantine threshold near 0.6 is common for safety-critical deployments, while exploratory or research agents may operate with lower thresholds at the consumer's discretion. The alignment function decomposes into role-decision alignment, justification-persona alignment, and reflection-outcome alignment, each weighted by policy. Default weights are evenly distributed; safety-critical consumers commonly emphasize role-decision alignment, while creative-or-exploratory consumers emphasize justification-persona alignment.

The integration rate determines how quickly a drift event pulls coherence downward. A high integration rate makes the field responsive but noise-sensitive; a low integration rate produces a smoother trajectory at the cost of detection latency. Practical values place the time-to-half-step between several decisions and several dozen, tuned per agent class. Decay toward baseline operates with a half-life on the order of hours to days for healthy operation, deliberately long so a temporarily quiescent agent cannot escape an earlier drift signal by simply ceasing to act.

Persistence of the field across substrate migration is required. Narrative-coherence travels with the agent's serialized state, validated on arrival against the agent's lineage. A migration that omits the field, presents an inconsistent value, or fails the lineage check is rejected by the receiving substrate's admission policy. The field is also persisted across checkpoint snapshots; a rollback to a known-good checkpoint restores coherence to the value at that snapshot, with subsequent events re-scored from the restored persona-and-goal record.

Sampling and audit access are governed. The field is readable by the agent's confidence governor (so deliberation can self-throttle when coherence is degrading), by the supervising governance plane (so quarantine and rollback can be triggered), and by post-incident audit (so reconstruction can verify that drift signals were emitted and acted on). Direct mutation of the field by the agent's reasoning surface is forbidden; only the deterministic update law operating over the structured event stream may write the field. This write-isolation is a hard architectural constraint: an agent cannot self-edit its coherence value to mask drift, and any code path that attempts such a write is a security violation rather than a benign optimization.

Checkpoint discipline shapes the field's operating semantics. The persona-and-goal record against which alignment is computed is itself a versioned, signed artifact issued at governance checkpoints; an unauthorized change to the persona record invalidates subsequent coherence calculations. When the supervising plane authorizes a persona update — for example, a re-anchoring after legitimate drift, or an expansion of the agent's chartered scope — the new checkpoint is signed, the running coherence value is reset to the policy-defined post-anchor baseline, and the alignment function operates against the new record going forward. The lineage retains the prior checkpoint, prior trajectory, and the authorization that bridged them, so audit can reconstruct the full identity history rather than seeing only the current persona.

Alternative Embodiments

Embodiments of the alignment function range from explicit symbolic constraint checking (does this decision violate a stated rule of the persona) to embedding-space cosine alignment between decision summaries and persona descriptions, to learned classifier scoring against a held-out persona-aligned reference set, to ensemble combinations of these approaches. The deterministic-update requirement is met as long as the chosen function is reproducible from recorded inputs; stochastic components are admissible if seeded and recorded.

Drift-signature embodiments include monotonic-decline detection over a sliding window, step-drop detection across a single event horizon, area-under-curve deviation from baseline, and frequency-domain analysis identifying periodic identity oscillation. The Cognition Patent treats the canonical drift signal as the policy-driven combination of these analyses; consumers may emphasize different signatures based on the threat model that matters for the deployment.

Embodiments of the governance response to drift include immediate quarantine (suspend the agent, hold for human review), rollback (restore the agent to a recent known-good checkpoint and resume), re-anchoring (issue a fresh persona-and-goal checkpoint, accepting the new trajectory as authorized), bounded-capability degradation (drop the agent to a reduced action envelope while coherence recovers), and termination (decommission the agent and replace from the original template). Multi-agent embodiments allow the fleet supervisor to compare drift trajectories across agents derived from a common template, distinguishing population-wide drift driven by environment from individual drift driven by an internal failure.

Single-agent and multi-agent embodiments share the same field structure. In multi-agent fleets, each agent maintains its own narrative-coherence value, and the supervising plane aggregates these into fleet-level coherence indicators that detect coordinated drift, identity collapse across replicates, or template-level integrity faults. The aggregate is itself a policy-bounded structure with its own drift detection, layered over the per-agent fields.

Composition with the Other Six Affective Fields

Narrative-coherence composes with the six forward-modulation fields by acting as a meta-stability check on them. A persistent decline in narrative-coherence raises the agent's effective uncertainty sensitivity (it becomes more cautious as identity becomes less stable) and reduces its novelty appetite (it stops exploring while integrity is in question). These cross-field couplings are encoded in the agent's affective policy and operate deterministically; they are not emergent heuristics.

The field also composes with the agent's confidence governor. A confidence decision that would normally admit a high-stakes action is conditioned on narrative-coherence above the action's coherence-floor parameter. Actions with high autonomy, high blast radius, or high reversibility cost carry higher coherence floors; actions with low blast radius and easy reversal carry lower floors. The result is that a mildly drifting agent retains the capacity to perform low-stakes work while being structurally barred from high-stakes work until coherence recovers or the agent is re-anchored.

Composition with delegation is direct. A parent agent considering delegation reads the prospective child's narrative-coherence as part of the delegation decision; delegations to drifting children are refused or downgraded. The same read happens at delegation acceptance time on the child side: a child agent whose own coherence is degraded refuses incoming delegations that would compound the instability. The bidirectional check produces a delegation graph in which only structurally-coherent parent-child pairs persist, and in which a coherence event in any node ripples to its delegation partners as a re-evaluation prompt rather than a silent change in operational semantics.

Composition with the agent's lineage and audit substrate makes coherence a first-class lineage attribute. Every checkpoint, every delegation, every governance action carries the coherence value at the moment of the event, the alignment-function decomposition that produced it, and the events scored into it since the prior checkpoint. The lineage thereby contains a complete record of the agent's identity trajectory, sufficient to answer not only the question "what did the agent do" but the question "what was the agent's structural state when it did it" — and this is the question that licensing, regulation, and post-incident review most often need answered.

Prior-Art Differentiation

Existing literature on agent affect treats affective state as a forward-modulation device — bias on candidate evaluation, bias on exploration, bias on persistence — without a structural integrity field. Where consistency or stability properties are discussed, they appear as ad hoc heuristics, external supervisor checks, or post-hoc evaluation metrics. None occupy the canonical-field position with deterministic updates, policy-bounded ranges, mandatory persistence across migration, and a governance contract that quarantines on drift.

Identity-stability and self-consistency literature in language-model alignment is concerned with output-level consistency (does the model's surface response remain stable) rather than with reasoning-trace-level coherence (does the chain of decisions and justifications align with the declared persona and goal). The Cognition Patent's seventh canonical field operates at the trace level and is therefore a structural property of the agent rather than a property of any given response.

Related work on persona conditioning treats persona as an input-side conditioning artifact (a system prompt, a fine-tuning corpus, a retrieved persona document). The seventh canonical field treats persona alignment as a measured, persisted, governance-coupled property of the agent's runtime state, with explicit detection of drift away from the conditioned persona. The shift from input-side conditioning to runtime-state monitoring is the patentably distinguishing structural move.

Disclosure Scope

The Cognition Patent's disclosure of narrative-coherence as the seventh canonical affective field covers the field's data structure and bounded range, the deterministic alignment-function update law, the multi-stream comparison against checkpoint persona-and-goal records, the drift-signature catalogue and the policy-driven combination thereof, the governance hooks for quarantine, rollback, re-anchoring, capability degradation, and termination, the composition rules with the other six affective fields and with confidence governance and delegation, the persistence requirement across substrate migration with lineage validation, and the multi-agent fleet aggregation and template-integrity detection.

Embodiments across symbolic, embedding-based, learned-classifier, and ensemble alignment functions are within scope, as are drift signatures based on monotonic decline, step drops, area-under-curve, and frequency-domain methods. Single-agent and fleet embodiments share the same canonical-field structure. The licensable primitive is the canonical-field position itself — narrative-coherence as a deterministic, policy-bounded, persisted, governance-coupled structural integrity field — rather than any specific alignment function or drift detector.