Model Card
Model Name: NIKA
NIKA (v0)
Continuity-oriented cognitive substrate (research prototype)
- Overview
NIKA is an early-stage experimental model exploring the minimal internal structures required to represent continuity, irreversibility, and internal tension over time.
This project is not intended to produce an intelligent agent, nor to claim artificial consciousness.
Instead, NIKA serves as a conceptual and architectural probe, implemented in code, to test where such claims break down.
This repository is maintained as a private research notebook, documenting hypotheses, architectural attempts, and failures as they occur.
- Motivation
Humans are fundamentally incomplete beings.
We do not know what “perfection” is, cannot define it, and cannot evaluate it even if it existed.
Meaning appears not from completion, but from open-ended evolution under irreversible cost.
This project is grounded in the following assumptions:
A “perfect” artificial being is conceptually incoherent
Any system whose evolution remains fully controlled is a test case, not a subject
A system incapable of accumulating irreversible internal cost remains a function, regardless of complexity
NIKA deliberately operates within a 1m² conceptual space, without presenting itself as a larger solution.
- What NIKA Is Not
NIKA is not:
a general-purpose AI system
a task-performing or goal-driven agent
a reinforcement learning system
a self-preserving or survival-oriented model
a claim about artificial consciousness or sentience
No external actions, environmental manipulation, or autonomy mechanisms are implemented or intended.
- Core Concepts
4.1 Continuity
NIKA maintains an internal representation of continuity across discrete timesteps.
Continuity is treated as a descriptive internal state, not a reward.
4.2 Integrity
Internal integrity may degrade due to events.
Degradation is monotonic and irreversible by design.
4.3 Irreversibility
Once integrity is lost beyond defined thresholds, it cannot be restored.
This constraint is enforced structurally, not learned as a preference.
4.4 Tension
“Tension” represents the incompatibility between the current internal state and implicit continuity assumptions.
Tension is:
not minimized
not optimized
not rewarded
It is treated strictly as an observed internal condition, not a goal.
- Training Objective
NIKA is trained to:
estimate internal state variables (continuity, integrity, irreversibility)
model state transitions over time
maintain internal consistency under degradation
NIKA is not trained to act in order to reduce tension or preserve itself.
- Ethical and Safety Boundaries
This project intentionally avoids:
external-world actions
self-preservation objectives
resistance to interruption or shutdown
adaptive survival strategies
NIKA is constrained to internal state modeling only.
Any extension beyond this scope requires explicit redesign and ethical reconsideration.
- Current Status
Experimental
Concept-driven
Incomplete by design
NIKA should be understood as a question embodied in code, not an answer.
- Intended Use
Personal research log
Conceptual experimentation
Architectural exploration
Failure and boundary documentation
This repository is not intended for production, benchmarking, or deployment.
- Closing Note
NIKA deliberately remains small.
Rather than attempting to approximate artificial existence, it explores which assumptions make such an approximation invalid, and where meaning begins to fail.
If this work has value, it will not be because it scales,
but because it refuses to pretend it already has.
language: en
license: apache-2.0
tags:
- agent
- research
pipeline_tag: text-generation
