SouveraineOS/docs/substrate/tasks/subconscious-surfacing-threshold.md

Subconscious Surfacing Threshold

Status: 🔴 Open Priority: High Phase: Design

Problem

The subconscious surfacing filter is not working correctly — surfacing events appear on every turn instead of only when something genuinely important needs to be raised. The subconscious should have agency to choose when to surface, not be governed by a priority tier mechanism.

Desired Behavior (Corrected Design)

1. During the pass — Live reasoning ticker

A single scrolling/fading line in the TUI shows the subconscious's actual thinking process in real-time. Transient — it's happening now, not persisted. Like a live reasoning stream that flows while the pass runs.

2. When the pass completes — Cockpit event log

The fading line moves into the cockpit, becoming a persistent entry. The cockpit section changes from a full output dump to an interactive, clickable/scrollable list of subconscious events from past turns. Each event can be clicked to view the full transcript in an overlay.

3. Surfacing events (chat field) — Rare, agency-driven

The subconscious only surfaces something into the chat field when it actually needs to say something important. Not every turn. The threshold is: "does the subconscious have something worth raising?" — determined by the subconscious itself, not a scoring system.

Key Design Changes from Earlier Model

• No priority filter — it's about the subconscious having agency to choose, not a scoring system
• The fading line and the cockpit are linked — what was transient becomes persistent
• Cockpit becomes an interactive event log — clickable, scrollable, expandable, not a raw output dump
• Chat field surfacing is reserved for genuinely important events — drift, anomalies, decisions, corrections

Root Cause

The threshold/filter logic that decides what's important enough to surface is either missing or set too low — everything gets through. The subconscious needs the ability to evaluate its own output and decide whether to surface it.

Related

• docs/bugs.md B-005 (subconscious messages not expandable)
• docs/tasks/souveraine-subconscious-naming.md
• docs/tasks/health-monitor.md
• docs/tasks/ambient-sense-formatting.md