Reasoning.

Reasoning handles open-ended cognitive load: hypothesis generation, multi-step deduction, scenario evaluation, structured deliberation. It is the kernel brain that thinks for the system when no single domain specialist is sufficient. It works closely with Planning on multi-stage problems and with the Quorum brain when its conclusions are about to be acted on at high stakes. Outputs are typed reasoning artefacts the audit ledger can link to downstream actions.

• 01Multi-step deductive and inductive reasoning
• 02Hypothesis generation and ranking
• 03Counterfactual evaluation
• 04Typed reasoning artefacts for audit linkage

Authoritative external corpora and standards this brain treats as canonical. Every retrieval against these sources is signed into the audit ledger so a regulator can prove which evidence drove which output.

• 01Mickai Patent 02, 15, 16
• 02Tree-of-Thought and Chain-of-Thought academic literature
• 03Selection-Inference and scratchpad models
• 04ARC-AGI benchmark suite
• 05OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1 reasoning papers
• 06MATH and GSM8K reasoning corpora
• 07Stanford ICAR cognitive-reasoning archive
• 08Logical-frameworks textbook canon
• 09Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on reasoning

Mickai-native tooling primitives this brain implements internally. Codex for sovereign plain-text graph PKM, Lectern for spaced-repetition memory, Stele for citation-provenance, and domain-native primitives layered on top. No external services in the trust path; data stays on operator-personalised hardware.

• 01Sinew (chain-of-thought agent framework)
• 02Codex (reasoning-trace plain-text graph)
• 03Tablet (intermediate-step outliner)
• 04Lattice (counterfactual link analysis)