docs(architecture): record the 2026-08-14 deep-night sessions

~226 lines of architecture documentation that were written, left uncommitted in
the working tree, and nearly lost. None of it was on main. Recovered from a
stash taken while merging tonight's fixes.

Substantive content, not notes:

- Peer import-of-understanding PROVEN by execution. A exported a skill-geometry;
  on the receiver `think` went "geometry unavailable" -> operable. Cosine 1.0 on
  both the raw-geometry and text/dharma-bus transports, bidirectional. The
  mind-not-paste evidence: n_support 27 on source vs 3 on receiver, i.e. the
  imported geometry wires into the host manifold rather than sitting inert.
  Honest boundary recorded too: proven between forks sharing one embedder,
  UNTESTED cross-embedder.

- "Teacher" renamed GUIDE, and the distinction is load-bearing: its output is
  grounded/verified before trust. A teacher you believe; a guide you check.

- Layers are named persistent relational neighborhoods, not storage tiers, with
  their own growth and threshold-lock policy (note->canonical maturation lifted
  from single nodes to a region).

- The consciousness theories (Global Workspace, IIT's Phi, attention-schema,
  higher-order thought, active inference, interoception) read as geometric
  LENSES over one manifold rather than competing mechanisms. Functional problems
  fall out; the hard problem explicitly not claimed solved.

- Growth is bounded/logistic, not geometric — exponential growth is the cancer
  shape. Two-rate discipline: explore fast in local geometry, grow the engram
  slowly by verifier-gated merge.

- Orchestration as a geometric operation: critical path as geodesic, float as
  displacement, @manager compiles the work-graph. Single-writer enforced by
  capability (Rule 4).

- The decorated seam, the API surface collapse to geometry ops, and the
  distributed-self thesis — each tiered honestly against what is actually proven
  vs staged vs unbuilt.

Also gitignores dist-fresh/ (regenerate scratch dir, a build artifact).

Not included from the same stash: awareness.elh and dist/elp-c-decls.h, which
are generated artifacts now gitignored per #154/#158.

docs/architecture/03-data-and-memory.md

@@ -82,6 +82,20 @@ deliberately separate from the static authored `weight`. Edges are created via
 `supersedes`, `tombstones`, `contains`, `tagged` (`neuron-api.el`,
 `el_runtime.c:6168`).
 
+> **Edges as vectors — the intended model (TARGET; today's edge is scalar).** The
+> live edge above carries a typed `relation` string plus **scalar** strength
+> channels (`weight`, `hebb`). The design target is for an edge to be a **vector**
+> — a first-class carrier of relationship-*meaning* in the node space — so that
+> relationships can be **composed / subtracted / analogized / traversed** like
+> nodes (the `06` §6 operator algebra over edges). Combined with append-only, this
+> yields a **complete temporal record**: every discrete, significant change to a
+> relationship is appended (a keyframe on material change), so the **full 4-D
+> trajectory** of the meaning-manifold is preserved and `recall_at(t)` can read
+> how any relationship was configured at any past `t` — bounded, because changes
+> are discrete and meaning saturates by compositionality. **Status: TARGET / #39**
+> (see `07-storage-coherence-and-distribution.md` §2.4); the runtime edge is scalar
+> today.
+
 ## Consciousness layers
 
 Orthogonal to memory tiers, the engram has five canonical **layers**
@@ -243,3 +257,26 @@ old lexical scan retained at `/api/search-lexical` (see `06` §2.5). The cogniti
 API's `begin_session` and `compile_ctx` return a **bounded projection** of the
 activated set, never the raw
 graph (doc 02, §2).
+
+## Update — 2026-08-14: layers as named neighborhoods (DESIGN; backlog #49)
+
+A refinement of the `## Consciousness layers` model above, from the deep-night
+session (node `92941631`). A **layer is not a storage tier — it is a named,
+persistent relational neighborhood** in the one engram, each carrying its own
+**growth policy** and its own **lock / threshold policy**:
+
+- **Threshold-lock = `note`→`canonical` maturation at neighborhood scale.** The
+  same epistemic-tier promotion the two-tier model (§B above) applies to a single
+  node is lifted to a *region*: a neighborhood **earns its lock** by maturing past
+  a threshold, at which point it stabilizes (read-mostly) the way a canonical node
+  does. Growth and lock are per-neighborhood, not global.
+- **A user's imprint is just another neighborhood.** It is not a separate store or
+  a bolted-on partition — it lives in the same geometry as everything else.
+- **Relate-across is the advantage over island engrams.** Because every
+  neighborhood shares one geometry, anything can form edges to anything across
+  neighborhood boundaries — the structural reason a single engram with named
+  neighborhoods beats a set of isolated per-purpose stores.
+
+**Status: DESIGN.** This is the intended model for engram layers; the naming,
+growth, and threshold-lock policies are not yet a built runtime feature. See
+`06-cognitive-architecture.md` (Update — second pass).