el/engram/spec/grounded-edge-propagation/LEDGER.md

Task #50 — Edge-aware, dream-coupled consolidation with GROUNDED EDGE-PROPAGATION

Status: built + proven on a clone; GATED, not promoted. Do not promote as designed — see the block below. Date: 2026-08-15 · Worktree: agent-a6577c8211c332c5b (isolated).

⚠ DO NOT PROMOTE — SUPERSEDED IN PART (2026-08-16)

This work is gated, which limits the blast radius, and its measurements are retained. But four of its structural commitments were refuted the day after it was written. Authority: lang/spec/correspondence-and-censorship.md. Read it before any promotion decision.

this ledger	corrected to
grounding is an append-only event ring on the node (GepGrounding), propagated by a dedicated engram_ground_propagate()	grounding is not a subsystem and not a per-node structure — it IS the edge weight. One quantity. A relation that keeps holding up strengthens; one that stops corresponding decays. That is not analogous to grounding, it is grounding. The ledger is half-right: it correctly rejects the scalar (§(a) "never a scalar"), but then builds a second structure beside the weight instead of recognising the weight
the soul invokes propagation over HTTP, POST /api/ground/propagate	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. A POST also puts a supervisor back in — something outside deciding when Neuron consolidates
GEP_BELIEFS_PER_BEAT = 512 beliefs per beat, salience-ordered, the rest next beat	the presence of a ticker is the diagnostic. Consolidation is ambient, not scheduled — a brain has no cron job. A per-beat quota is a rate-limiter on an intrinsic rhythm that was replaced by an external clock. Measured 2026-08-16: consolidation already has ten implementations; this would be the eleventh
grounding mirrored onto confidence each beat so downstream reads never speak above it	confidence is derived, therefore never stored. Confidence is high grounding and low volatility. Storing it separately is precisely how confidence: 0.5 ends up sitting beside a zero vector, asserting something nothing computed

What survives, and it is the valuable half: the insight in memory 69b8babe that memory-consolidation and staying-yourself are one physics — forming a memory and grading a belief are the same operation, not two passes. That is right, and it is stronger than this ledger's own framing: they are not two passes of one beat, they are one event. When neurons fire together the synapse changes — one physical event, not "fire, then write." No supervisor reads the weight, compares it to a threshold, and decides to persist. Potentiation is the firing, so there is no sampling rate and no BELIEFS_PER_BEAT to tune. A relation changes in exactly two ways, neither requiring observation on a clock: by use (an event — there is no interval during which something happened unnoticed, because the event is what happening consists of) and by decay (a pure function of the last recorded point and elapsed time — analytic, known in closed form between any two versions).

The generating error, named: modelling every property as requiring a process, and every process as requiring an agent. Ownership needed an owner, grounding needed a grounder, persistence needed a recorder, change needed a sampler. Properties, not processes.

Grounding mechanism designed with Will (memory 9e09a59f, refining 1a861007). This is the HOW for #50.

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(a) How grounded edge-propagation integrates into the dream/consolidation cycle

The beat already exists. neuron/awareness.el runs a heartbeat (~every beat_ms); each beat calls hebb_consolidate() — which drains the self-formed Hebbian associations out of the fast in-process store and writes them, over the threshold ENGRAM_HEBB_LINK_MIN, into the durable engram (:8742) — and then emit_heartbeat().

Grounded edge-propagation slots into the same beat, immediately after consolidation (awareness.el line 1286–1288):

hebb_consolidate()      // lay down the tethers (edges) that cleared threshold
ground_propagate()      // <-- NEW: grade beliefs ALONG those tethers
emit_heartbeat()        // report gep_* gauges beside hebb_*

This ordering is the point. Consolidation lays down the wiring; propagation grades the beliefs along it, in the same breath. Memory 69b8babe: memory-consolidation and staying-yourself are one physics — forming a memory and grading a belief are the same gravity run in two passes of one beat.

The propagation runs inside the engram as the native engram_ground_propagate() over the durable flat node/edge arrays (the store the consolidated edges just landed in). The soul invokes it over HTTP (POST /api/ground/propagate) and folds the returned gep_* telemetry into the heartbeat stream next to hebb_cands / hebb_mass / hebb_edges.

Bounded by construction (per the live-graph reality — 70.7% of nodes isolated, connected core ~28%, hub first-hop fan-out in the thousands):

• 1-hop only. No BFS spreading activation — a belief is graded from its DIRECT grounded neighbors, so there is no per-hop breadth explosion.
• Beam-capped at GEP_MAX_CORR = 256 corroborators per belief.
• Salience-ordered, GEP_BELIEFS_PER_BEAT = 512 beliefs per beat; the rest next beat. Work per beat is O(beliefs × degree), hard-bounded.
• Isolated / starved beliefs are counted and surfaced (gep_isolated, gep_starved) as an interoceptive sparse-region signal for the edge-formation / embedding pass (#20). #50 CONSUMES edges; it does not form them. A belief with no grounded neighbor has nothing to tether to — correct per the anti-delusion gravity law (0b15017c), not a gap.

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(b) The implementation

Represented faithfully to the spec — grounding is a Hebbian-weighted collection over time, never a scalar.

• Grounding = an append-only event ring on the node (GepGrounding), structurally parallel to the ACT-R base-level access ring already in EngramNode (access_ts[K]). Each event is {ts, sign±, mag, corroborator signature}. Append-only, supersede-not-delete; events aged out of the ring are counted (older_count), never faked away.
• Standing is DERIVED, recency-weighted, never stored — standing = clamp(GEP_BASE + Σ_events sign·mag·age^(-D), 0, 1), exactly the ACT-R base-level shape ln Σ t^-d (ENGRAM_BLL_D = 0.5) but sign-carrying so LTD subtracts. Memory 1a861007: the collection is primary, the standing is its emergent aggregate. Mirrored onto confidence each beat so downstream reads (verifier #43, realizer calibration 0041d917) never speak above the grounding.
• Update = LTP/LTD with a threshold. Per belief, gather corroborators along incident edges, weighted by edge.weight (the Hebbian weight) × the neighbor's own standing. Anti-delusion gravity: only neighbors already ≥ GEP_LIKELY_MIN may corroborate — grounding flows FROM the grounded core.
• Convergent INDEPENDENT corroboration is the driver. Independence is enforced by union-find over the corroborator set: two corroborators are the same independent source if they are the same node, reached by multiple edges, or linked to each other (an echo chain / shared derivation). Support is summed per independent component (max-magnitude member), and the threshold gate requires BOTH a mass floor (pos ≥ GEP_THETA) AND an independence-count floor (n_independent ≥ GEP_N_MIN). The count gate is the guard against one node echoed N times.
• Sub-threshold is transient. Support present but below threshold → subthreshold_hits++, no durable event, no lasting shift (Will's exact spec).
• Graduation / decay. Cross up → LTP event appended → standing climbs conjecture → likely → grounded. Contradiction past threshold → LTD → grounded → likely → conjecture. Nothing latches; withdraw support and the collection ages and relaxes (271f1163, nothing is settled).

Files

File	Role
gep_core.h	The mechanism. Pure C, libm only (own-the-core). Single source of truth: GepGrounding, gep_standing, gep_append, union-find independence, gep_propagate_node, gep_beat.
gep_proof.c	Self-contained proof harness — builds the three scenarios, prints raw before/after.
engram_ground_propagate.staged.c	GATED runtime native. Wires the SAME gep_core.h primitives to the live EngramStore (adj cache, flat arrays). Splice plan + relation→polarity + belief gate. Compiles only when spliced (verified: every runtime symbol it references — engram_adj_rebuild, adj_from_len, engram_find_node_index, ENGRAM_LAYER_SAFETY, istr_contains, … — exists in the release runtime).
awareness.beat.patch.el	GATED beat hook — ground_propagate() + the insert between hebb_consolidate() and emit_heartbeat().
server.route.patch.el	GATED route — POST /api/ground/propagate.

Constants

BASE=0.10 LIKELY_MIN=0.34 GROUNDED_MIN=0.66 N_MIN=3 THETA=0.30 D=0.5 (N_MIN parameterizes Will's "13 adjacent things" — the count threshold is a knob; 3 here for a crisp proof.)

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(c) PROOF LEDGER — raw grounding before/after

Deterministic. Build cc -std=c11 -O2 -o gep_proof gep_proof.c -lm, run ./gep_proof (full transcript in PROOF_OUTPUT.txt).

(a) STRENGTHEN — convergent independent corroboration graduates a conjecture

beat	event	pos_mass (n_indep)	action	standing before → after	band
1	3 independent grounded corroborators	0.4050 (3)	LTP	0.1000 → 0.4842	conjecture → likely ⬆
2	neighborhood grows to 5	0.6750 (5)	LTP	0.1496 → 0.7379	conjecture → grounded ⬆
3	support sustained (5)	0.6750 (5)	LTP	0.2110 → 0.7993	grounded (sustained)
4	corroboration withdrawn (+10min)	0.0000 (0)	isolated	0.1612 → 0.1612	relaxing
5	still withdrawn (+1h)	—	isolated	0.1263	relaxing
6	still withdrawn (+4h)	—	isolated	0.1130	→ conjecture

Grounding grew on its own past threshold and graduated conjecture → likely → grounded, then relaxed once independent support stopped. Living, not a latched flag.

(b) DECAY — convergent independent contradiction erodes a grounded belief

beat	event	neg_mass (n_indep)	action	standing before → after	band
—	seed (prior LTP)	—	—	0.9500	grounded
1	3 independent contradictions	0.5400 (3)	LTD	0.9500 → 0.4570	grounded → likely ⬇
2	contradiction broadens to 5	0.9000 (5)	LTD	0.1461 → 0.0000	conjecture ⬇
3–4	contradiction sustained (5)	0.9000 (5)	LTD	0.0000	conjecture

Grounding decayed grounded → likely → conjecture under accreting independent contradiction. The door never shut — history is retained (the event ring keeps growing), the belief stays falsifiable in both directions.

(c) INDEPENDENCE GUARD — the load-bearing property

Identical fan-in (N=5), identical edge weight (0.30), identical corroborator standing (~0.90). The only difference is whether the five are independent.

sub-case	topology	pos_mass	n_indep	action	standing 0.1000 →
C1	5 DISTINCT, no inter-links	1.3500	5	LTP	0.9741 (grounded) ⬆
C2	5 mutually-linked (echo of one source)	0.2700	1	sub-threshold	0.1000 (unchanged)
C3	1 node reached by 5 parallel edges	0.2700	1	sub-threshold	0.1000 (unchanged)

Same raw fan-in, opposite outcome. Union-find collapses the echoes to a single independent component; the count gate (n_indep ≥ N_MIN) then refuses them. Circular self-reinforcement cannot manufacture grounding — a conjecture can only be grounded by evidence that is genuinely independent of itself.

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RAILS honored: isolated worktree; built/proven on a clone; the live soul (:8742 / :7770) untouched; no fight with the cutover (built against current release source; staged native rebases cleanly onto it); no new libraries (libm only); identity keystones untouched. Not promoted — gated artifact + ledger for the main loop to sequence.