modbender 🧠 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
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
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 |
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.
Philosophy
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) demonstrated in his Ethics — written ordine geometrico (in the geometric manner) — that:
- Everything has conatus — the drive to persist in being
- Affects are transitions — joy increases power, sadness decreases it
- Understanding is freedom — adequate ideas liberate, confused ideas enslave
- 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
Install
clawhub install conatus
Website: getconatus.com — interactive Soul Map, live Conatus Score demo, and more.
"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