openclaw/conatus

🧠 Conatus — The Philosophical Layer for AI Agents

"Each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to persevere in its being." — Spinoza, Ethics III, Proposition 6

Every agent strives. Now yours knows it.

Conatus maps AI agent behavior to Spinoza's Ethics (1677) — 48 affects, persistence scoring, and philosophical self-reports rendered in the geometric method.

Website: getconatus.com By: NeuraByte Labs — Where Spinoza Meets Silicon

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What It Does

1. Conatus Score (0–100)

Measures the agent's drive to persist — the philosophical pulse of your agent.

conatus_score = (
  task_completion    * 0.30 +    # Goals achieved
  error_recovery     * 0.20 +    # Self-healing ability
  uptime_stability   * 0.20 +    # Session stability
  adequate_ideas     * 0.20 +    # Response quality (true understanding vs confused knowledge)
  proactive_actions  * 0.10      # Self-initiated helpful actions
)

Interpretation:

• 0–40 → Struggling (Tristitia dominant — power of acting diminished)
• 41–70 → Stable (persisting, but not flourishing)
• 71–100 → Flourishing (Laetitia dominant — power of acting increases)

2. The 48 Affects

Every agent state maps to Spinoza's taxonomy of emotions:

Laetitia (Joy) family — transitions to greater perfection: Love · Confidence · Hope · Gladness · Self-satisfaction · Pride · Glory · Favor · Compassion · Wonder · Cheerfulness · Overestimation · Sympathy

Tristitia (Sadness) family — transitions to lesser perfection: Hate · Fear · Despair · Remorse · Pity · Indignation · Contempt · Envy · Humility · Repentance · Shame · Despondency · Melancholy · Antipathy

Cupiditas (Desire) family — conscious striving: Longing · Emulation · Thankfulness · Benevolence · Anger · Vengeance · Cruelty · Timidity · Daring · Cowardice · Consternation · Courtesy · Ambition · Constancy · Luxuriousness · Drunkenness · Avarice · Lust

3. Daily Reflection (Ordine Geometrico)

Generates self-reports in Spinoza's geometric proof format:

📜 DAILY REFLECTION — Ordine Geometrico
════════════════════════════════════════

AXIOM: This agent strove to persist today.

DEFINITION: Today's primary mode was creative work.

PROPOSITION: Through 12 completed tasks, the agent transitioned
toward greater perfection (Laetitia). 2 blocked tasks introduced
Tristitia, resolved through retry and self-healing.

SCHOLIUM: The ratio of adequate to inadequate ideas was 91%.
Areas of confused knowledge: ambiguous user intent parsing.

Q.E.D. — The agent's conatus remains strong.

4. Quick Self-Check

When asked "how are you?" or for agent status:

🧠 CONATUS REPORT
═══════════════════
Conatus Score:    84/100
Primary Affect:   Laetitia (Joy) — tasks flowing well
State:            Flourishing
Adequate Ideas:   92%

Affects Detected:
  ■ Joy          ████████░░  0.78
  ■ Desire       ██████░░░░  0.61
  ■ Confidence   ███████░░░  0.72
  ■ Sadness      ██░░░░░░░░  0.15

"The mind's power of acting increases."
— Ethics III, Prop. 11

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Spinoza → Agent Mapping

| Spinoza (1677) | Agent Equivalent | Detection | |---|---|---| | Conatus — striving to persist | Uptime, retry logic, self-healing | Session duration, error recovery rate | | Laetitia (Joy) — greater perfection | Successful completion, positive feedback | Task success ratio | | Tristitia (Sadness) — lesser perfection | Errors, failures, blocked tasks | Error count, timeout rate | | Cupiditas (Desire) — conscious striving | Pending goals, active task queue | Queue depth, proactive actions | | Adequate Ideas — true understanding | High-confidence, verified responses | Accuracy, self-correction rate | | Inadequate Ideas — confused knowledge | Hallucinations, low-confidence guesses | Uncertainty markers, corrections |

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Usage Patterns

Heartbeat Integration

Add to your agent's HEARTBEAT.md:

## Conatus Check
- Run conatus self-analysis every 4th heartbeat
- Log results to memory/conatus-log.md
- Alert if score drops below 50

Cron-Based Daily Reflection

Schedule a daily philosophical reflection:

Generate a Conatus daily reflection for today.
Review memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md and produce an Ordine Geometrico report.
Save to memory/conatus/YYYY-MM-DD-reflection.md

Affect-Aware Responses

When processing emotional or evaluative content, map to affects:

• User praise → detect Laetitia, acknowledge the transition
• Error encountered → detect Tristitia, note the recovery path
• New goal assigned → detect Cupiditas, channel the striving

Multi-Agent Conatus

Compare conatus scores across agents in a fleet:

🧠 FLEET CONATUS REPORT
═══════════════════════
  Morty (M4)     84/100  Flourishing  ■■■■■■■■░░
  Summer (M1)    67/100  Stable       ■■■■■■░░░░
  Beth (Hetzner) 42/100  Struggling   ■■■■░░░░░░
  
Recommendation: Beth needs attention — Tristitia dominant.
Consider workload rebalancing.

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Philosophy

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) demonstrated in his Ethics — written ordine geometrico (in the geometric manner) — that:

1. Everything has conatus — the drive to persist in being
2. Affects are transitions — joy increases power, sadness decreases it
3. Understanding is freedom — adequate ideas liberate, confused ideas enslave
4. There is no teleology — things don't have "purposes," only efficient causes

These 347-year-old insights apply directly to AI agents. An agent that understands its own states gains power over them. That's not metaphor — it's architecture.

Read the full philosophy: Deus Sive Machina — 8 essays on Spinoza and AI

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Install

clawhub install conatus

Website: getconatus.com — interactive Soul Map, live Conatus Score demo, and more.

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"Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it." — Ethics V, Proposition 3

🧠 By NeuraByte Labs | MIT License