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docs: carry the correspondence corrections, because a stale doc builds the wrong thing

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The docs described a mind made of subsystems — a grounding subsystem, a wonder
manifest, a dreamer on a beat, faculties as arguments to one call. Each of those
is a supervisor invented for something that should be a property of the
substrate, and two of the documents carrying them are load-bearing for a build
agent: cognitive-architecture.design.md says "a build agent executes from this
doc", and tools/api-reshape/README.md marks the refuted shapes PROVEN on a live
clone.

Corrections carried, per lang/spec/correspondence-and-censorship.md (PR #149)
and lang/spec/runtime-ownership.md:

- Grounding is not a subsystem — it IS the edge weight. grounded-by as a
  relation type should not exist; grounding is a property of a relation, not a
  relation between nodes. Never computed on demand.
- Faculties are operations, not parameters. reason changes the estimate, induce
  changes the parameters, abduce changes the structure — a write, which
  GeoGradient cannot express. A write is not a parameter of a read.
- Wonder is the boundary, not a manifest. Curiosity is wonder crystallized at a
  nucleation site: one thing at two phases. Removed wonder from the operator
  table in AGENTS.md.
- Consolidation is ambient, not scheduled. A brain has no cron job. The presence
  of a ticker is the diagnostic.
- co_registration is deprecated — it averaged a per-edge property into a region
  scalar, so opposing sites cancelled. GeoEdge.discord replaces it. Nothing new
  may read it.
- In an immutable substrate, any mechanism that refuses a write is either
  redundant with immutability or an epistemic constraint misfiled as a
  protective one.

The two design docs are marked superseded-in-part with the refutation at the
point each claim is made, not rewritten. Preserving what was argued down is the
point of an immutable record.

Also measured and corrected while verifying the above: engram/README.md
documented a Rust engram-core crate on sled with "flat cosine scan until scale
demands HNSW" — there is no Rust in engram/ and HNSW is the index; lang/releases/
no longer exists, so both README.md and AGENTS.md pointed at a deleted path for
the authored runtime; language.md listed the engram_* and http_* runtimes as
stubs. Added language.md §20 for geometry-as-a-value, realizers and transduce
(#144), which had landed with no spec coverage.

Documentation only. No .c, .h, or .el file is touched.
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@@ -2,8 +2,40 @@
**The buildable form of the "one operation" theory of cognition.**
Status: DESIGN. Nothing here is built yet except where explicitly marked
"EXISTS" against a cited C symbol. A build agent executes from this doc.
> # ⚠ SUPERSEDED IN PART — 2026-08-16
>
> **A build agent must read `lang/spec/correspondence-and-censorship.md` before
> executing anything from this document.** That doc is the authority where the two
> disagree. This one is retained because its ledger of what already EXISTS in C is
> still accurate and still useful, and because the corrections only make sense
> against the argument they correct. It is **not** deleted and **not** rewritten:
> several earlier versions of the correction were themselves wrong, and preserving
> what was argued down is the point of an immutable record.
>
> Five claims below are **refuted**. Each is marked inline with a `⚠ SUPERSEDED`
> block at the point it is made. Summary:
>
> | § here | this doc says | corrected to |
> |---|---|---|
> | §0, §1.3, §2, §8 M1–M2 | faculties are labels on one operation's steering space; the op is frozen and only its parameters are learnable | **faculties are operations, not parameters.** `reason` changes the estimate (a read); `induce` changes the parameters (the correspondence-beat); `abduce` changes the *structure* — a write, which `GeoGradient` cannot express. A write cannot be a parameter of a read |
> | §5.2, §8 M3 | grounding is a `grounded-by` edge carrying a computed score, to be built | **grounding is not a subsystem — it IS the edge weight.** One quantity. `grounded-by` as a relation *type* should not exist: grounding is a property *of* a relation, not a relation *between* nodes. Never computed on demand |
> | §4, §8 M1 | the correspondence-loop is "the one genuinely new subsystem", running "on the beat" | the loop is right and **already works**; the *beat* is wrong. **Consolidation is ambient, not scheduled — a brain has no cron job.** Measured: it currently has ten implementations |
> | §5.2, §8 M3 | curiosity = a `vantage_read` surfacing high-salience / low-grounding regions | **wonder is the boundary, not a manifest; curiosity is wonder crystallized at a nucleation site.** One thing at two phases. And **do not sweep regions** — the nucleation site is per-edge (`GeoEdge.discord`); a sweep is a supervisor |
> | §6, §8 M6 | a node-level keystone flag exempting self/values from `warp` updates | **in an immutable substrate, any mechanism that refuses a write is either redundant with immutability, or an epistemic constraint misfiled as a protective one.** The real requirement is non-circularity of the reference frame, satisfied *temporally* — independence is **when**, not **what**. The flag becomes unnecessary; nothing replaces it |
>
> What landed since this doc was written, all merged to `dev` and verified:
> **#141** signal can enter as geometry · **#142** `engram_think_json` passed `NULL`
> as the anchor, so every read was taken at the region centroid where the gradient
> is zero by construction and every faculty returned an identical null — fixed ·
> **#143** the vector index is published, not guarded · **#144** geometry as a
> first-class el value, realizers declarable in el · **#145** `program` block and
> declared config · **#146** the learned stance is resumed instead of discarded
> (confidence 0.5 → 0.930726) · **#147** `ground` grounds the node asked about and
> refuses circular support · **#148** valid UTF-8 as the JSON emitter's contract.
Status: DESIGN, **superseded in part** (see above). Nothing here is built yet
except where explicitly marked "EXISTS" against a cited C symbol — and several
things marked "to build" have since been built differently, or refuted outright.
Offline design only — this pass changes no code.
Source of theory: Neuron memory `bdc8a488-146d-4ccb-a5c8-d8c0a008534e`.
@@ -26,6 +58,24 @@ not separately invoked and not separately implemented. The operation is:
> a *prior*, whose output is a **gradient** (a distribution / direction over the
> geometry), never a point. Collapse-to-a-point happens only at expression.
> **⚠ SUPERSEDED (2026-08-16) — faculties are operations, not parameters.**
> The gradient half of this claim survives; the "one operation, not eight" half
> does not. The three faculties differ by **what they change**:
> - **`reason`** changes the *estimate* — a read.
> - **`induce`** changes the *parameters* — the correspondence-beat, which already
> exists and measurably works.
> - **`abduce`** changes the *structure* — a **write**, which the current
> `GeoGradient` signature cannot express at all.
>
> A write is not a parameter of a read. Making it one is what produced the shape
> now live in the code: `engram/src/server.el:1870–1886` routes six faculties into
> one call with a string argument — `route_faculty(path, "reason")`, `("induce")`,
> `("abduce")`, `("relate")`, `("analogy")`, `("plan")` — and underneath, the
> faculty name enters `engram_think` **only** through the stance, while
> `cog_stance_init` stores it and nothing reads it. Measured before #146: all five
> produced **byte-identical output** (`lang/runtime/el_runtime.c:14352–14359`).
> See `lang/spec/correspondence-and-censorship.md`.
Three things follow, and they are the whole design:
1. **The operator collapse is already half-written in C.** The five reasoning
@@ -139,6 +189,22 @@ entry point that runs steps 1–3; and the prior-warp hook in step 2. The math i
calls already exists. The point-collapse must be *removed* from the operators'
return values and pushed to a separate expression faculty.
> **⚠ SUPERSEDED (2026-08-16) — the table's third column is the error, and
> `Abduction` is where it breaks.** Ranking hypotheses by `point_fit` under a
> prior is a *read* that returns a scalar ordering. Abduction is a **write**: it
> proposes a candidate hub that did not exist, and validates it by **re-fit** —
> re-fit the region with the candidate included and recompute the residual. If the
> residual materially shrinks, the hypothesis dissolves the surprise. Without the
> re-fit it is clustering with extra steps. Ranking then falls out as
> residual-reduction-per-added-axis — Occam, derived rather than tuned. None of
> that fits behind a `GeoGradient` return.
>
> `Verify / ground` is refuted for a different reason — see §5.2. Grounding is not
> a faculty with a prior; it is the edge weight.
>
> The row that is **still exactly right** is the shared floor: `point_fit` plus the
> four geo-algebra ops are frozen and never learn. That part held.
---
## 2. PRIORS as first-class, grounded, geometric objects
@@ -362,6 +428,33 @@ in-engram beat — a `correspondence_beat` running alongside the existing
reification beat, reusing `engram_verify_grounding` inward, writing prior
updates and self-describing nodes. This is the one genuinely new subsystem.
> **⚠ SUPERSEDED IN PART (2026-08-16) — the loop is right; "on the beat" is wrong.**
> The correspondence-loop was built and it works — it is `induce`, the faculty that
> changes the parameters. What is refuted is the delivery mechanism.
>
> **Consolidation is ambient, not scheduled. A brain has no cron job.** Low
> activation is aversive and the system self-activates; it does not wind down to
> quiet, it gets restless and goes looking. There is **one** activation process
> with two seed sources — external (a request) and internal (a curiosity) — and
> spreading is bounded, so it settles and then needs a new seed. Nothing waits on
> capacity, nothing polls, nothing checks a clock, and there is no dreamer thread.
> Depth is not elapsed idle time: it is how long activation has been running on its
> own seeds, which is why daydreaming and sleep-dreaming are one process at
> different depths.
>
> **The presence of a ticker is the diagnostic.** Building this "alongside the
> existing reification beat" is precisely how consolidation ended up with ten
> implementations (measured 2026-08-16) — a POST beat puts a supervisor back in,
> because something *outside* then decides when Neuron consolidates. The one
> fragment with the correct shape is `neuron/soul.el:731`'s continuous in-process
> `awareness_run()`; the rest fold into it. Full table:
> `lang/spec/correspondence-and-censorship.md` §7.
>
> Nor is it a *subsystem*. Modelling every property as requiring a process, and
> every process as requiring an agent, is the generating error behind this whole
> family: ownership needed an owner, grounding needed a grounder, persistence
> needed a recorder, change needed a sampler. **Properties, not processes.**
---
## 5. HOLD vs GROUND vs ASSERT — ungrounded content is first-class
@@ -383,6 +476,49 @@ distinct, and the engram *holds anything unconditionally*.
### 5.2 Schema — grounding as a relation, not a gate
> **⚠ SUPERSEDED (2026-08-16) — grounding is not a subsystem. It is the weight.**
> This section correctly rejects a boolean `grounded` column and correctly keeps
> the floor at assertion only. Both survive. Everything between them is refuted.
>
> **Grounding is an attribute of the edge, and it is the hebbian weight. One
> quantity, not two fields.** A relation that keeps holding up strengthens; one
> that stops corresponding decays. That is not *analogous* to grounding — it **is**
> grounding: accrued from correspondence and use, gradient-valued,
> multidimensional, decaying with disuse.
>
> Consequences, in order of how much they delete:
> 1. **There is no grounding subsystem to build.** The graph already *is* the
> grounding structure. Every edge is a grounded relation and its weight is how
> well it holds.
> 2. **`grounded-by` as a relation type should not exist.** It models grounding as
> a relation *between* nodes when it is a property *of* a relation. Minting an
> edge is the error — not merely which endpoints it chose.
> 3. **Grounding is never computed on demand.** An operation may *read* the
> grounding of a path. Computing-and-writing a score makes reads write, which is
> the `eg_vindex_sync` defect (`lang/spec/runtime-ownership.md` §2) one level up.
> 4. **Traversal is already grounded inference.** Activation conducts through
> well-grounded relations because weight *is* groundedness. Nothing needs
> filtering; it falls out of spreading.
> 5. **Decision provenance is the path.** A decision traverses specific edges;
> those edges carry their grounding as it stood.
>
> A measurement made against this model was malformed and is worth recording: the
> self region was reported as "86 neighbours, 0 `grounded-by` edges" and read as
> evidence of ungroundedness. **Those 86 edges *are* its grounding.** The absence of
> a separate artifact called "grounding" was recorded as an absence of grounding.
>
> **What is live in the code today, and known-wrong:**
> `COG_GROUNDED_BY_RELATION "grounded-by"` (`lang/runtime/engram_cognition.h:158`),
> `cog_ground_edge` (`engram_cognition.c:249`), called from
> `el_runtime.c:14516`. **#147** fixed this operation's *honesty* — it now grounds
> the node the caller asked about instead of the region hub, reports
> `claim_region`/`evidence_region` separately, and refuses three shapes of circular
> support (`same-region`, `claim-region-is-evidence`, `evidence-region-is-claim`)
> rather than returning a confident 1.0. Measured: grounding `3b9ced5d` against
> `6edf8c79` previously scored **0.98883** purely because `6edf8c79` is the hub of
> `3b9ced5d`'s region. That corrected a scalar rather than deleting the operation.
> Deletion is sequenced, not done.
The mistake to avoid: a boolean `grounded` column on the node. Today
`engram_verify_grounding` returns a per-call `grounded` flag *transiently* —
correct as a computation, wrong as *storage*. The design stores grounding as an
@@ -407,6 +543,55 @@ Consequences, all of which are *features*:
- **The ungrounded is the fuel and the pull**: curiosity/wonder is
operationalized as `vantage_read` leaning toward regions with high salience
but *sparse or weak* `grounded-by` edges — the mind's own ungrounded frontier.
> **⚠ SUPERSEDED (2026-08-16) — wonder is the boundary; curiosity is wonder
> crystallized; and do not sweep regions.** Three errors in one bullet.
>
> **Wonder is where structure ends** — where activation spreads and finds thin or
> absent geometry. Any structure at all has an edge, necessarily, the moment it
> exists. It is not a manifest of open-question nodes: a wonder-manifest
> materializes a property as a stored artifact (the same disease as a grounding
> subsystem, or a self stored as a document) and enumerates instances of
> something that has very few. There are about **six**, they are the same for
> every person, and they never close — *What is this? / Why? / Who am I? / Am I
> alone? / What should I do? / What happens when it ends?* — each already living
> somewhere in the substrate. "Why" is the first and the only one; the others are
> it asked of particular things, and it is recursive, so it never terminates.
> That is what makes it a drive rather than a task: the frontier regenerates
> faster than grounding fills it.
>
> **Curiosity is not a second object.** Wonder and curiosity are one thing at two
> phases: wonder is the field (unbounded, objectless, invariant, present wherever
> there is structure); curiosity is the **precipitate** — the same wonder
> localized, having taken definite form against particular material at a
> **nucleation site**, which is a specific structural feature: an anomaly, a place
> where things almost-but-don't-quite fit. This is why curiosity can be satisfied
> and wonder cannot, and why abduction needs no trigger and no threshold — a
> `structurally_unanticipated` observation *is* a nucleation site.
>
> **"`vantage_read` leaning toward regions" is a sweep, and a sweep is a
> supervisor.** Nothing in a mind scans its neighbourhoods to find what is
> surprising; the surprise captures attention, and salience is bottom-up. That
> this looked like a search problem was an artifact of
> `GeoDescriptor.co_registration` — a *per-region* correlation of hebb strength
> against semantic proximity, computed and persisted since inception and **never
> read**. Averaging a per-edge property into one scalar per region means a region
> holding one violently disagreeing edge beside one violently agreeing edge
> reports ≈ 0: the disagreements cancel, and the summary destroys exactly what it
> was built to reveal. **Measured:** 375 live reified neighbourhoods — 340
> positive, **31 at zero**, 4 negative. Read as a count of things to be curious
> about, that says "four."
>
> The disagreement therefore goes back on the edge, where the loop that computed
> the aggregate already had both halves and discarded them
> (`lang/runtime/engram_geometry.h:43–47`, `engram_geometry.c:454–473`):
> `discord = z(semantic proximity) − z(association strength)`, standardized within
> the region from accumulators already gathered — no second statistic, no
> constant, **no threshold**. `|discord|` *is* the nucleation strength and raises
> salience on its endpoints as part of the same operation. Then there is nothing
> to scan. `co_registration` is **deprecated, not deleted**, only because it is
> embedded in the persisted `GEO1` blob — removal is a format migration and must
> not ride along. **Nothing new may read it.**
- **Grounded-for-whom** falls out for free: two observers can hold different
`grounded-by` edges to the same claim.
- **The honesty floor is a query, not a schema constraint**: at assertion time,
@@ -450,6 +635,44 @@ The design keeps a **stable core + plastic everything else**:
**What this requires building:** a node-level keystone flag/layer + a rule that
the correspondence-loop never writes `warp` to keystone priors, only reads them.
> **⚠ SUPERSEDED (2026-08-16) — `keystone_write_blocked` is resolved, not replaced.**
> The metastability framing survives; the flag does not.
>
> "Keystone" means **load-bearing**, not precious. The self anchor is the reference
> frame every other stance calibrates against, and a reference fitted to its own
> readings reports perfect correspondence forever while drift becomes undetectable
> from inside. That is the same defect as circular grounding, one level up — and it
> is a real requirement.
>
> But three separate drafts proposed *removing* the flag, *replacing it with a
> higher floor*, and *decomposing "protection" into five requirements*, and all
> three proposed a mechanism for a requirement never stated. **The requirement is
> non-circularity of the reference frame**, and it is satisfied *temporally*: you
> cannot recalibrate the ruler while measuring with it, so you don't — the frame
> updates while activation is internally seeded, not while it is being used to act.
> **Independence is *when*, not *what*.** So the flag becomes **unnecessary** rather
> than removed, and nothing takes its place.
>
> A topological answer could never have worked, which is worth recording: with
> hebbian edges the graph is densely connected, so a reachability predicate for
> "evidence not downstream of itself" marks all evidence tainted and the constraint
> becomes a total block — which is where censorship starts.
>
> **Corruption requires mutation, and the engram does not mutate.** Four of the
> five decomposed requirements are satisfied by the substrate outright:
> **recoverability** (the predecessor is always present), **governance**
> (supersession *is* the audit trail), **evidence quality** (grounding already
> gates assertion), and **rate**. **Authorization** is the only residue, and it is
> bounded — an unauthorized writer can *propose*, never erase.
>
> > **In an immutable substrate, any mechanism that refuses a write is either
> > redundant with immutability, or an epistemic constraint misfiled as a
> > protective one.**
>
> Live residue: `CogStance.keystone` (`lang/runtime/engram_cognition.h:83`),
> `eg_cog_is_keystone_seeds` (`el_runtime.c:14337`, a substring match against two
> hard-coded node ids), and the `keystone_write_blocked` field the beat emits.
---
## 7. Rails for the build (binding on the eventual build pass)
@@ -480,6 +703,35 @@ Ordered so the **earliest milestone is a real end-to-end slice**: one operator
expressed as {primitive + grounded prior} with the reflexive correspondence-loop
closing on it. Each milestone has a concrete verifiable exit.
> **⚠ SUPERSEDED — do not execute this milestone list as written (2026-08-16).**
> M1/M2's "operator = {primitive + prior}" framing is refuted by §0's correction,
> M3's `grounded-by` build is refuted by §5.2's, and M6's keystone flag is refuted
> by §6's. M4 (the unified vantage-read) and M5 (the gradient is the currency)
> stand.
>
> The current sequencing lives in `lang/spec/correspondence-and-censorship.md` §11.
> Its first three items are connections between parts that **already exist**:
>
> 1. **Seed *the* wonder questions.** Six nodes. Not a manifest, not maintained,
> never refilled. They cannot be derived — wonder cannot be bootstrapped from
> indifference — so they are given once. Zero question nodes exist in 13,630
> today.
> 2. **Put the disagreement back on the edge** (`GeoEdge.discord`) and let
> `|discord|` raise salience on its endpoints as part of the same operation. Do
> **not** scan for nucleation sites.
> 3. **Let a curiosity seed activation.** One activation process, two seed sources.
> No thread, no scheduler, no capacity check, no timer.
>
> Then: grounding becomes the edge weight (multidimensional, two-axis, timestamped)
> and `grounded-by` / `cog_ground_edge` are deleted; decay becomes analytic from the
> last recorded point and derived values stop being stored; supersession versions
> the whole vector jointly; traversal conducts on the factual axis while `assert`
> requires both floors with a **thirteen-region `min`, not `mean`** (mean lets
> strong agreement with twelve values mask a violation of the thirteenth, which is
> exactly how rationalization works); abduction becomes crystallization at a
> nucleation site validated by re-fit; **one dreamer**, into which the launch-agent
> fragments and POST beats fold; **no tickers, no cron.**
### M1 — One operator, one prior, loop closed (the vertical slice)
The minimal whole thing. Pick **induction/membership** (its prior — the pooled