One of Omega's recurring design corrections is deceptively small: the system should not "think every ten seconds."
That is a timer. It may be useful for a service loop, but it is not a satisfying model of cognition.
The preferred rule is:
As soon as idle, cognition resumes.
01 – Why The Timer Felt Wrong
A periodic timer creates the appearance of continuity while preserving the deeper assistant shape:
- wait;
- wake;
- call a model;
- produce an output;
- sleep again.
That can be engineered, but it keeps making the system feel like a queue processor wearing a cognitive mask.
Omega's goal is different. Idle time should not be empty. If no external task is active, the architecture should return to unresolved concerns, active goals, memory consolidation, prediction gaps and self-generated questions.
02 – Cognitive Transition
The recovered v2 notes point toward a cognitive-transition or control-policy model.
The question becomes:
- What state is Omega in now?
- What mental objects are currently active?
- What pressures are acting on them?
- What action, if any, should the system take next?
- Should it reason, recall, consolidate, plan, observe, speak, act or stay quiet?
This is not the same as picking the next function in a fixed pipeline. It is closer to a policy over cognitive state.
03 – Why This Matters For Will
The will problem does not vanish just because cognition runs continuously. A system can loop forever and still have no reason to prefer one concern over another.
But the control-policy framing gives the problem a place to live.
Motivation can be modelled as pressure on state transitions: unresolved goals, prediction error, novelty, repeated failure, affective value, curiosity, user commitments and self-maintenance can all affect what becomes worth acting on.
The open question is how much of that policy should be hand-built, learned, model-evaluated or split across specialist processors.
04 – Current Belief
Omega's control layer should be presented as research, not as a solved claim of machine will.
The useful public language is:
- continuous cognition;
- attention and salience;
- cognitive state transitions;
- idle thought;
- long-term concerns;
- goal pressure;
- model processors inside an architecture.
The unsafe language is anything that implies solved sentience, solved agency or a magical emergence of desire from an LLM.
Source note: assembled from the v2 archaeological-pass material on cognitive-transition/control-policy direction and the earlier "as soon as idle" design rule.