AIM Framework glossary
AIM Operational Loop
Canonical definition
The coupled two-path system through which the Body Manager, the Thinker, the Observer, the Decision Hub, and the Belief Register produce motivated behaviour. The fast path (action-initiation) runs continuously: the Body Manager signals bodily deficit states; the Observer assesses the Object field continuously, conditioned on Thinker priors accessed through the Belief Register and on its distinctive social-world input stream; the Decision Hub integrates the signed scalars and tag-strips into the signed Common-Currency Scalar V; the Thinker performs Ground-Resolution on V and returns a ground-attribution; that resolution feeds back into the Decision Hub, which initiates acquisition or engagement on the attributed ground. At habit timescales, action-selection is driven directly by the Decision Hub's intrinsic cached-value (habit) store, bypassing fresh Ground-Resolution; the Observer's read of the Belief Register conditions the Salience that feeds the Decision Hub but is not the route by which habitual selection is executed. Loop termination occurs by Body-Manager satiation (when acquisition repairs a genuine deficit), Thinker boredom (when engagement exhausts its self-sustaining dynamic), or interruption. The Observer does not terminate within the loop: it is the continuous conditional assessment channel, not a loop participant with a completion state. The slow path (Belief-Register maintenance) runs concurrently: the Thinker continuously updates its priors about the Body Manager, itself, the Observer, and the Object field, and writes Belief-Register Updates; the updated Register conditions the Observer's next assessment cycle and habit-level selection, and shapes the Thinker's Hypothesis Space for its next Ground-Resolution. The two paths together constitute the minimal interaction pattern required to generate the systemic outputs documented here. The Operational Loop is specified at the Disaggregation Primitive level per the Dashboard Gauge Principle.
Explanation
The AIM Operational Loop is how the architectural components actually work together in real time. There are two things happening at once. The fast loop is the action loop: the Body Manager notices a bodily need, the Observer continuously scans and flags what in the world might matter (conditioned on Thinker priors in the Belief Register), the Decision Hub combines the signed signals into a single want-signal, the Thinker figures out why the signal is there and what to do about it, and the Decision Hub acts on the Thinker's call. At familiar timescales the Observer reads the Belief Register and routes habit-selection without a fresh deliberative pass. This loop stops when the body's need is repaired, or when engagement gets boring, or when something else interrupts. The Observer does not stop, because scanning does not have a stopping point while you are awake. The slow loop is the learning loop: the Thinker updates its sense of how the world works and writes those updates to the Belief Register, and those Belief Register updates shape how the fast loop runs the next time around. The whole framework's derivations (non-satiation, Object Parasitism, scapegoating, the Confabulation Cascade) fall out of this two-path loop operating under Source Opacity.
Epistemic status
Canonical.