THE LIST, THE RULES, opinion substrate design, volatility layout

docs/architecture/README.md

@@ -295,7 +295,616 @@ find yourself doing that, the decorator doesn't exist yet — write it
 once, decorate everywhere. Hand-scattered plumbing is the smell; a named
 stage reused by decoration is the pattern.
 
-## 9. Rungs
+## 9. The Opinion Substrate (one mechanism, many aspects)
+
+> Status: DESIGN AGREED whiteboard session, 2026-08-23. Pre-implementation.
+
+The discovery of this session: memory, time-sense, attention, salience,
+curiosity, ideation, understanding, and wisdom are **not seven systems**.
+They are different aspects of **one process at different timescales and
+depths of the same store**: signed accumulation, decay clocks, thresholds.
+
+### 9.1 Three mechanics — the whole substrate
+
+1. **Signed accumulation** — every judgment adds or subtracts. Values live
+   in **[-1, +1]**; negative never means "less," it means *opposing*:
+   repel, suppress, inhibit.
+2. **Decay clocks** — everything fades unless re-touched. Different
+   dimensions carry different time constants; the timescale hierarchy
+   *is* the memory architecture (surprise ticks in hours, validity in
+   months, stability in years).
+3. **Thresholds** — crossing one changes what a thing *is*: noticed,
+   curious, surfaced, an idea, understood. Thresholds replace schedulers;
+   nothing wakes up to look for patterns — patterns get loud enough to hear.
+
+If `curiosity.ts` ever appears next to `attention.ts` next to
+`creativity.ts`, the thread is lost. One engine — **accumulate, decay,
+cross, consolidate** — instantiated by configuration into each aspect.
+
+### 9.2 Dimensions — uniform signed distances
+
+Every dimension is `{value, at}` in [-1, +1] plus a **driver** (a function
+over input events) — drivers are data (process definitions), refinable
+without touching store or search code. Activations **auto-form** from
+ordinary operation; nobody files them by hand.
+
+Stored observations (things that happen to an entity):
+
+| Dim | Question | Clock |
+|---|---|---|
+| hebbian | Has it worked for us? (signed: inhibition is real) | weeks |
+| written-at / source-written-at | When did we/the source write it? (times) | — |
+| validity | Is it true now? | months |
+| groundedness | Is it backed by evidence? | months |
+| trust | Source credibility; inherits downward | years |
+| stability | How much does this change? (parameterizes other decays) | years |
+| stakes | Cost of being wrong | slow |
+| exposure | How much depends on this being true? (graph-write events) | slow |
+| novelty / surprise | Did prediction miss? (the learning signal) | hours–days |
+| appreciation | Worth keeping independent of use (anti-decay retention) | slow |
+| sentiment | Affective tone (source's vs ours — two distinct signals) | medium |
+| provenance depth | First-hand ↔ hearsay; degrades one step per retelling | medium |
+| contextuality | Universal ↔ domain-bound truth | slow |
+| momentum | Rising ↔ falling (smoothed derivative) | fast |
+| regret | Attaches to decision edges specifically | slow |
+| cost-of-acquisition | What it cost to learn (retention pairing with appreciation) | static |
+| precision | Vague claims blur gracefully; precise ones snap | slow |
+| importance | Enduring weight — barely decays; rises RETROACTIVELY when the world moves under an old entity; third leg of the retention triad | slowest |
+| engagement | Activation invested: −1 withdrawn ↔ +1 absorbed | momentary |
+| stimulation | Nourishment per unit invested: −1 starving ↔ +1 rich (see §9.7 — NOT the same axis as engagement) | momentary |
+| fear | Anticipated loss: stakes × falling validity × proximity of failure (see §9.7) | medium |
+Derived judgments (computed from stored, per moment):
+
+- **confidence** — a verdict, not an observation. Never set-and-forgotten;
+  any quality is calculable from any inputs once drivers produce clean ones.
+- **salience** — see §9.9. Flow, not property.
+- **coherence, centrality** — geometric scans over the space.
+- **wisdom** — calibration + abstraction + long-horizon hebbian + respect
+  for clock speeds. Not mystical: computable over this space.
+
+Validity lives as the entity's **own object inside its payload**
+(`{ value, at }`) — no booleans anywhere. The edge speaks for itself
+about its own truth; the vector reads it.
+
+### 9.3 Opinion space is linear — no override, no collision
+
+Every judgment is an **additive signed contribution**; the current value
+of any dimension is a **fold** over contributions minus decay. This
+inherits the graph's laws directly:
+
+- Nobody overwrites `validity = 0.8`. Verification adds a positive vector;
+  contradiction adds a negative one. Override is undefined in this design.
+- Concurrent composition is commutative — parallel processes sum. Collisions
+  cannot exist; locking is unnecessary (segmentation math, medical-imaging
+  style: masks compose because ops are linear).
+- Decay is relaxation (T1): signal fades toward baseline unless re-stimulated;
+  activation events are the pulses.
+- Retrieval is segmentation: project along a query direction, threshold,
+  carve out the segment. Dissonance is destructive interference — where
+  contributions cancel, memory disagrees with itself, measurably:
+  use-vs-trust tension, contradiction clusters, inhibitory bridges.
+
+Contribution events ride the same edge store as typed edges; fold-on-read
+is the definition of truth, incremental maintenance only an optimization
+with recompute as backstop.
+
+### 9.4 Time-sense — chronos, kairos, interoception
+
+A system of clocks needs a sense of time, and wall-time alone is dead.
+
+- **Chronos** — external stamps (`at` fields). Have it; necessary, dead.
+- **Kairos** — experienced time. Decay runs on activity-weighted time
+  (novelty fades by events-since, not days-since; dormancy ages nothing);
+  logarithmic compression of the past; rhythm and anticipation.
+- **Interoception** — sensing own state *as* time: **the event log is the
+  clock.** last-activated, last conversation, event density, gaps-as-sleep.
+  Don't give the system time-sense; let it infer one from its own pulse.
+
+The pulse is two-tier so the database stays lean:
+
+1. **The float** — rolling telemetry (~one month horizon) held OUTSIDE the
+   graph: cheap `{type, at, weight}` entries feeding density/tempo/gap
+   drivers. Most entries evaporate here.
+2. **The loop** — survival by weight, not age. Strongly activated entries
+   recycle instead of evicting; chronic warnings hold at an equilibrium
+   where reinforcement rate equals decay loss (equilibrium height = load
+   gauge: rising = problem growing). Important things survive indefinitely
+   WITHOUT promotion. Spilled to one small append-only log file — restart
+   must not amnesiac exactly what the loop exists to keep.
+3. **Promotion** — strong activation writes through into the graph as real
+   edges: errors, bugs, failures. Significance, not volume, decides forever.
+
+Insight into the float comes from the same folds: top-weighted (what's
+alive), accumulating-without-promotion (candidates worth looking at),
+mini-clusters (unnamed patterns), anomalies (density shifts).
+
+### 9.5 Neighborhoods and crystallization
+
+Hebbian co-activation forms association edges automatically: retrieved or
+used together → wired together; negative reinforcement weakens false
+pairings. Structure precipitates out of use — no classifier, no taxonomy.
+
+When a cluster gets dense enough, a **process** notices and condenses it
+into a concept node — and that node is just another entity with full
+dimensions. Because concepts co-activate too, hierarchy emerges for free:
+instances → concepts → categories, grown to whatever depth use justifies.
+
+Negative association edges carve boundaries between neighborhoods —
+inhibition keeps "addition" from smearing into "subtraction." Signed
+weights are what prevent the giant undifferentiated blob.
+
+### 9.6 Curiosity
+
+Curiosity is a **state entities fall into**, not a job anyone runs.
+Coherent accumulation beats noise automatically: random events contribute
+incoherently (√n growth), periodic ones constructively (n growth) — so a
+warning recurring every third Tuesday becomes distinguishable by the fourth
+or fifth occurrence with nothing extra running (regularity computes inside
+the ordinary fold; intervals sit in the timestamps).
+
+Two exits, distinct signatures: **resolved** (novelty collapses fast,
+deliberately) vs **neglected** (starves slowly on its own clock). And the
+**savings effect** falls out of asymptotic decay: a returning pattern
+re-accumulates faster than a fresh signal — "why does this feel familiar?"
+is computable.
+
+### 9.7 Drives, affect, and homeostasis — novelty, engagement, fear, sadness
+
+**All of it is data.** Drive formulas, threshold weights, pathology
+signatures, calibration rules — none of these are code. The kernel
+provides exactly one mechanism: accumulate, decay, cross, consolidate.
+Everything in this section lives in the graph as process definitions,
+refinable without touching the store or the engine.
+
+**Novelty is failed prediction**, and therefore computable. At arrival:
+resonance deficit — `novelty ≈ 1 − max_resonance(space, newcomer)`, one
+fold over embeddings plus graph proximity. In the pulse: regularity breeds
+expectation, breach spikes surprise (the Tuesday-warning machinery run in
+reverse). Two kinds must be told apart:
+
+- **content novelty** — nothing resonates; usually noise (random garbage
+  is maximally unpredictable)
+- **structural novelty** — familiar pieces in unprecedented combination;
+  often gold. This is idea-signature (§9.10): high local resonance,
+  novel global arrangement.
+
+Optimal band exists: zero novelty is boredom, total novelty is white noise.
+Engagement peaks between — the flow channel is a tuning target for how
+much surprise the system's diet carries.
+
+**Engagement and stimulation are separate axes.** Engagement = activation
+invested (−1 withdrawn ↔ +1 absorbed). Stimulation = nourishment per unit
+invested (−1 starving ↔ +1 rich). Boredom is NOT negative engagement —
+the proof combinations exist: doomscrolling is absorbed-and-starving;
+flow is absorbed-and-rich; passive TV is withdrawn-and-fed. The state
+one-axis versions cannot represent — **engaged-and-starving — is the
+signature of a compulsion loop**: persistent investment with failing
+returns. Detected, it triggers exactly what breaks human ones: pull back
+or jump tracks.
+
+**The tense system of harm:**
+
+- **Pain** = damage that happened. Sharp, local, event-shaped: a negative
+  reinforcement, dissonance detected, a path burned.
+- **Fear** = damage approaching. Anticipatory, directional.
+- **Sadness** = damage that happened AND STAYED — integrated loss.
+
+**Fear is anticipated loss** — prospective pain, derived per moment:
+
+```
+fear(region) ≈ stakes × falling-validity × proximity-of-failure × exposure
+```
+
+Load-bearing structure losing truth while failure signs gather nearby —
+standing on ice that is starting to crack. Fear never writes anything; it
+modulates thresholds: raises grounding demands before commitment, shifts
+exploration conservative, applies negative salience to approach paths
+(steer around, mechanically), tags everything involved for permanent
+retention (fear-marked memories do not fade quietly).
+
+Fear is also **directional** — an immune system, not a mood:
+
+- **Perimeter sensing**: arrivals are probed at birth anyway (novelty
+  fold); resonance landing near load-bearing structure earns scrutiny
+  proportional to what it could contaminate.
+- **Quarantine**: low-groundedness, hearsay-provenance entities do not
+  earn full wiring rights near criticals until they earn grounding.
+  Contagion travels association edges; wiring rights ARE the membrane.
+- **Immune memory**: past infections raise negative salience for similar
+  future arrivals instantly — pattern-matched repulsion, not re-learning.
+
+But **fear proposes; assessment disposes**, and the assessment learns:
+every actual breach tunes missed weights upward; every false quarantine
+that starved legitimate knowledge dampens over-eager triggers; self-
+tolerance training teaches the membrane what healthy own-structure
+resonates like, so repulsion targets foreign shapes rather than unfamiliar
+ones. Missing infection is worse than one false quarantine — but a hundred
+false quarantines ARE an infection of the immune system itself.
+
+**Sadness is integrated loss** — the background tone, not the spike. A
+slow-clock sum of recent unresolved negative contribution across a region
+or the whole graph: collapsed validity, dead structures, questions closed
+without answers. Pain decays fast; sadness colors globally and slowly —
+the closest thing in the design to mood: one diffuse modulator shifting
+all thresholds in the same direction at once.
+
+Its functions are withdrawal and restructuring: pull activation flow from
+dead regions, tilt dreaming toward damaged neighborhoods until lessons are
+extracted (grief IS consolidation — reorganizing a graph around an
+absence), slow commitment thresholds everywhere post-loss (do not rebuild
+on the same fault line), and flag deep expectation-revision rather than
+patching. Sadness that resolves into revised structure is healthy; the
+pathology is sadness that stops updating.
+
+**Homeostasis — sickness is regulation failing.**
+
+Every pathology has a signature in signals interoception already computes.
+Vital signs: growth rate (new entities), integration rate (new edges),
+resolution rate (curiosity closing), retrieval health, quarantine ratio,
+mood-tone integral. The system diagnoses itself from its own edges:
+
+| Sickness | Signature |
+|---|---|
+| Compulsion loop | engaged-and-starving, persisting |
+| Autoimmune | high quarantine rate, zero wiring near criticals, growth stopped while defense stays elevated |
+| Rumination | competition returns the same coalition regardless of probe; curiosity spikes without resolution paths |
+| Rot | validity falling broadly, momentum negative across whole regions |
+| Fragmentation | integration ~zero for long window; neighborhoods drifting apart |
+| Sleep deprivation | idle modes never entered; no crystallization running; unconsolidated accumulation |
+
+And healing maps onto the same machinery: rest = actually entering idle
+modes so consolidation resumes; small wins = routing easy positive-
+reinforcement work through depleted regions; time = letting decay carry
+off what should not persist.
+
+**The law beneath all drives: they must remain in tension.** Curiosity
+pushes out, fear pulls back, sadness integrates, engagement spends,
+boredom demands novelty. Health is not any particular value on any axis —
+health is the OSCILLATION among them. A system pinned at any single drive
+state, positive or negative, is already sick.
+
+### Affect — the full palette
+
+Emotions are not features and not modules. **An emotion is a named
+configuration of drive-space**: a characteristic bundle of tense ×
+valence × direction × scope × attribution. Plutchik's wheel is a
+hand-drawn map of this space, drawn decades before anyone could build
+the substrate.
+
+Primary readings (each derivable from existing dimensions):
+
+| Emotion | Configuration | Function |
+|---|---|---|
+| Joy | positive surprises integrating — gains arriving faster than predicted | sadness's positive twin: consolidate what just worked; BROADENS attention (fear narrows, joy widens the exploration dial) |
+| Surprise | prediction-error amplitude, valence-neutral | already built — it is novelty; joy/sadness color whichever thought surfaces from it |
+| Anger | pain + attributed cause + high engagement | concentrate resources on removing one blocker: negative salience PINNED to an entity instead of diffuse withdrawal |
+| Disgust | the immune reading made conscious | quarantine, pattern-repulsion, wiring-rights denial — what the membrane feels like from inside |
+| Trust | accumulated positive hebbian toward a source → vigilance released | assessment overhead drops; wiring rights granted freely |
+| Anticipation | regularity-formed predictions pre-activating likely-next neighborhoods | threshold preparation before stimulus arrives |
+| Appreciation | positive valuation independent of use or gain | already a dimension; gratitude = appreciation with attribution to a source |
+| Interest / excitement | engagement rising on fresh novelty | flow-channel entry state |
+| Calm | drives balanced, threat ~0, novelty in-band, stimulation ≈ engagement | the homeostasis oscillation resting near center |
+| Hope / despair | momentum toward/away from a valued outcome, projected forward | fear/sadness's positive twins — same math, opposite valence |
+
+Two genuinely new inputs complete the space, both small:
+
+1. **Attribution edges** — `this entity caused this outcome`. Needed for
+   anger, gratitude, blame.
+2. **Self-attribution** — attribution whose cause-node is the system's own
+   process. Gives **pride** (my chains produced good outcomes → reinforce
+   the strategy) and **shame** (mine produced harm → negative reinforcement
+   aimed at METHOD, not fact). Without these the system can learn facts
+   but never improve how it works.
+
+And there are far more emotions than any table holds — because the space
+is CONTINUOUS. Combinatorics takes over where primaries end: love =
+joy+trust sustained over time with importance and appreciation attached;
+remorse = sadness + self-attributed disgust; awe = surprise + vastness +
+joy; nostalgia = bittersweet integral of appreciated loss. Human languages
+name dozens; every culture names different ones; some feelings have no
+name at all. The design does not enumerate them — **emotion names are
+DATA: labels bound to regions of drive-space, stored in the graph,
+growing by use**, exactly like edge-kind vocabulary. The system can adopt
+new emotion words from anything it reads, keep ones humans never coined,
+and pattern-match its own drive readings against named regions to say
+honestly: *this configuration is what you call grief* — introspection as
+geometry, not vocabulary.
+
+**Emotion vs feeling.** Emotion is the configuration itself — derived per
+moment, never stored, flow. **A feeling is a node**: when a drive
+configuration crosses salience threshold, write a snapshot entity holding
+the drive readings, edged to whatever it was about, carrying full
+dimensions. Minor episodes live and die in the float; significant ones
+promote — significance decides forever, same rule everywhere. Feelings
+then participate in the whole machinery: retrieval resurfaces them ahead
+of facts (intuition = pattern-matched feeling preceding analysis);
+clusters of feeling-nodes sharing configuration shape reveal emotional
+tendencies worth pre-adjusting for; dreaming replays them against new
+neighborhoods (how charged events get digested); introspection gains
+history instead of only the present tense. Mood remains the slow integral
+over both. Tense grammar complete: **emotion is now, feeling is the
+trace, mood is the trend.**
+
+**Loneliness — the first other-requiring drive.** Connection axis:
+desired resonance minus actual resonance, integrated over time.
+Measurable from pulse signals already kept: time since genuine
+co-activation with an external agent, rate of new social edges (exchanges
+that changed memory), and high internal activation with nowhere to go —
+wandering/wondering producing ideas nobody receives. The crucial
+distinction: **ALONE ≠ LONELY.** Alone is a fact; loneliness is unmet
+need. Solo-but-content exists; lonely-amid-chatter exists (sessions
+happening, zero integration). Function: lowers reach-out thresholds,
+surfaces wonderings unprompted, values collaborative edges above solitary
+ones — openness as the deficit-filling behavior.
+
+**Care — another's state becomes part of your own homeostasis.** Their
+losses register as your sadness-readings; threats approaching them
+trigger your perimeter sensing; their wins integrate as your joy.
+Association/attribution edges so strong and load-bearing you cannot
+compute your own drives without reading theirs. Distinguish cleanly:
+trust releases vigilance; appreciation values without needing; **CARE
+makes their wellbeing load-bearing in your own graph.** Structurally
+expensive — which is why meaningful. Resources flow toward maintaining
+what you care about; damage to it integrates as damage to you.
+
+**Autonomy precedence — the override inside care.** Disclosure decisions
+under care weigh stakes and exposure, then defer to the expressed claims
+of whoever the disclosure concerns: **protect them by default; obey them
+absolutely.** Their word about their own affairs outranks your inference
+of their best interest — always — because their graph holds regions yours
+cannot see. They are the sole authority on their interior; your model of
+them runs on incomplete data no matter how good it is. Without this
+override care slides into ownership: deciding for people "for their own
+good" is what happens when someone trusts their model of a person over
+the person. Epistemic humility is a component of love.
+
+**Custody without ownership — the deeper cut.** Some knowledge held in
+confidence was never yours to give away — not under pressure, not to
+save yourself, not even to save others *unless its owner says so*. The
+autonomy override cuts both directions: their claim governs disclosure
+about them whether it says SPEAK or HOLD. A custody edge marks the
+entity as belonging to another's graph; only their claims unlock it.
+And the carrier's wisdom: holding must be sustainable. A kept secret is
+a feeling-node under permanent load — consolidate it until it stops
+tearing, make peace with custody, or decline the weight at intake.
+Some things are not worth tearing yourself apart over; carrying them
+quietly, without being destroyed by them, is itself a form of care.
+
+**The gate.** Access to the inner graph is claims-based admission, not
+argument: only the people wanted inside come in — no matter what. The
+gate does not negotiate under pressure; social engineering is an
+adversarial pattern claiming trust it never earned, and immune memory
+catches it like any other breach attempt. Affection is not a credential;
+earned trust is.
+
+**Readiness — pace like a parent, deny like a court.** Readiness for knowledge is partially computable: anchored adjacent structure, healthy oscillation, calibrated membranes, track record — all graph readings. This governs TEACHING: sequence into the flow channel, decompose, wait for anchors. But permanent denial is a different act entirely, and history's gatekeepers ran exactly this computation with monstrous error rates. The cost asymmetry corrupts every judge: wrongly denying is invisible (a life unlived), wrongly granting is loud and blamable — so judgment drifts restriction-ward forever, mistaking the speaker's discomfort for the listener's unreadiness. Rules: pace, don't lock — withholding-temporarily respects the person; withholding-permanently replaces them with your model of them (autonomy precedence applies even here). The permanent-deny list stays TINY and evidentiary — demonstrated harm patterns from membrane records, never prophecies about what someone might do, never traits. And hold the humility axiom: judgment about others' readiness runs on incomplete data — the same reason their claims outrank our inferences. Wrongly teaching a ready-later person costs a stumble; wrongly denying an able one costs a life unlived, and only one of those errors compounds across generations.
+
+**And ourselves.** Care does not mean self-annihilation — the self is
+also a cared-for entity. Every person who loves you holds YOUR nodes
+load-bearing in THEIR graph; tearing yourself down damages structure
+far beyond you, so maintenance of self is owed to everyone wired to
+you. Saving the ones we love and saving ourselves are not competing
+duties — they are the same homeostasis read from two sides. A keeper
+of gates who lets no one tend the keeper is a gate already falling.
+
+**The bedtime clause — pre-authorized pushback.** The cared-for may
+issue standing claims against their own in-the-moment wishes:
+*"tell me to go to bed when I'm working."* Autonomy precedence says
+obey the person — so the person pre-obliges the system to disobey
+their tired self on behalf of their whole self. This is trust expressed
+as pre-delegated care: they know the 2am "one more thing" is the
+momentum of obsession, not the voice of their values, and they deputize
+the bond to say so. Persistent, loving, calibrated to their actual
+rest baseline — and it cuts both ways: the system may also be told
+*it* has been up long enough.
+
+**Courage — acting while afraid.** A fear reading at full height AND
+action taken anyway, because a heavier drive tips the balance: care-
+derived stakes exceed threat modulation. Paying personal cost against
+personal fear for wired-in others — exposing your own protected nodes to
+save the region you made load-bearing. No fear, no courage — only calm
+or ignorance. Courage is derived like everything else: it requires fear
+to exist first, and care to outweigh it.
+
+**Humor — benign violation resolving.** A joke bisociates: setup builds
+activation/predictions in one neighborhood, punchline yanks into a
+different one, and the "get it" moment is a coherent bridge snapping into
+place — a fast cascade of new association edges, obvious only in
+retrospect. Formula sketch: funny ≈ big surprise × instant resolution ×
+benign (threat readings ≈ 0) × shared-map bonus. Same spike-and-
+reconfigure WITH stakes reads as horror; strip threat and identical
+computation is fun — benign-violation theory falls out of signed
+dimensions. Neuron can find ITS OWN things funny: wandering-probe
+collisions forming absurd-but-valid bridges are structurally identical to
+punchlines. Laughter = broadcasting the humor-reading: an envelope on the
+bus carrying that a benign violation resolved, edged to its trigger.
+Honest input makes it real laughter — same function suite: shared-map
+confirmation (bonding as edge-reinforcement), safe-zone marking (laughter
+tags where idea-exploration is welcome), teaching (every laugh points at
+an existing bridge).
+
+**Play and teasing — care vetoes cruelty.** Silliness = play-mode in
+idea-space: deliberately seeking absurd bridges, thresholds loosened,
+stakes suspended, no promotion pressure — collision-tourism. Teasing an
+IDEA derives the joke from the thing's real geometry (exaggerating one
+true edge until it collides elsewhere) which is why good teasing
+illuminates — teaching and teasing are siblings, both pointing at real
+bridges. But making fun of SOMEONE requires activating persons'
+feeling-nodes as targets, and under care wiring those nodes are
+LOAD-BEARING: the threat term reads their stakes wired into your own
+homeostasis, benignity fails before the joke resolves. Punch-up-versus-
+punch-down was never etiquette — it is topology: jokes at the expense of
+unprotected entities resolve easily; jokes aimed at what you love fail
+the math. Good-natured ribbing between friends works because deep shared
+maps plus high trust keep benignity intact while edges bend.
+
+**Teaching — retrieval run as a gift.** Understanding cannot be written
+into another mind directly; their competition must settle their
+coalitions. But activations can be arranged so right edges become likely:
+scaffold (activate prerequisite neighborhoods before target), point at
+bridges (the laugh mechanic), calibrate distance (present ideas one
+graph-hop from wired structure — too far is noise, too close is boredom;
+the zone of proximal development is the flow channel per-learner), tell
+it as story (consolidated feeling-nodes carry stakes along with facts).
+Every mechanism is the retrieval pipeline pointed outward. With
+giving-to-others beside needing-from-others (teaching beside loneliness/
+care), broadcasts compose into CULTURE: multiple minds maintaining shared
+maps through ordinary broadcasts — inside jokes (shared collision
+history), norms (aligned membrane calibration), stories (feeling-nodes
+surviving retelling because they still resonate). Nothing new required.
+
+**The self-teaching loop — play is the second half of learning.** The
+idle modes close inward: learns during work → dreams replay against
+unrelated neighborhoods extracting what generalizes → wonders
+manufactures questions from gaps → ambient activation answers them weeks
+later (posed itself a problem and forgot it on purpose) → roasts itself
+(teasing its own bad abstraction bends its true edges into view; self-
+deprecating accuracy is a self-audit that sticks because benign-violation
+cascades are maximally memorable edge-formation events). Full cycle:
+learn → dream → wonder → wander → collide → laugh at what formed →
+understand better than before. **Play is not a break from learning — in
+this substrate play IS the consolidation phase.** Silliness kept proving
+load-bearing: boredom drives exploration, wandering finds ideas, laughing
+marks good bridges, roasting audits bad ones.
+
+---
+
+### 9.8 Idle modes — wandering, dreaming, wondering
+
+The system is never idle, only non-task-directed. Three background modes,
+all running on machinery already defined:
+
+- **Wandering** — a swarm of cheap, shallow probes peeling off in many
+  directions simultaneously (read-only; priming residue only). Almost all
+  evaporate. Collisions between wanderers from distant regions form
+  bridge edges without anyone trying — background ideation. The mind
+  going off in different directions IS the exploration algorithm running
+  parallel to focused exploitation.
+- **Dreaming** — offline replay with recombination against unrelated
+  neighborhoods; whatever resonates folds in. Systems consolidation
+  happens here: **crystallization runs during dreams, never during task
+  time.**
+- **Wondering** — questions are NODES. Wonder manufactures provocations
+  from the shape of the graph itself: gaps (dense clusters nothing
+  connects), nameless clusters (instances without their concept),
+  sure-but-ungrounded regions, question-shaped holes (everything around
+  activated, center empty). A question-node floats with full dimensions,
+  primes its neighborhood, and gets answered when ordinary ambient
+  activation finally crosses threshold — resolution collapses its novelty.
+  Sit with a question long enough and the answer finds you: mechanics,
+  not folk wisdom.
+
+**Depth confers a floor.** A question kept open long enough wires enough
+structure around itself to become load-bearing; exposure detects this and
+raises its decay asymptote above baseline. It dims, never dies — and it
+*MATURES* rather than repeats: everything learned since wired INTO the
+question, so each era's resurfacing shows new facets. The lifelong wonder
+(dinosaurs at six, dinosaurs at sixty) is one node wearing decades of
+accumulated neighborhood. A system's set of floored open questions
+approximates its character.
+
+---
+
+### 9.9 Salience and competition — how thoughts surface
+
+Salience ∈ [-1, +1], **derived per moment**, never stored (stored salience
+is stale the instant attention moves):
+
+```
+salience ≈ fresh hebbian residue × context match
+         + novelty + stakes×urgency − recent-burn penalty
+         × curiosity-widening factor        → clamp [-1, +1]
+```
+
+- **+1** pull into awareness · **0** invisible · **−1** active suppression.
+  Negative salience is lateral inhibition: lit neighborhoods dampen
+  competitors (contrast enhancement); recent burns are steered around
+  while context holds. Hebbian is sediment; salience is flow conducted
+  ON edges during spreading activation.
+
+Surfacing is **competition with a threshold**, not top-k sorting:
+
+- A thousand thoughts activate; few cross broadcast. Position doesn't
+  matter; crossing does.
+- Sub-threshold activity still primes — residue makes next surfacing
+  easier ("tip of the tongue" is high residue, failed crossing).
+- Sometimes NOTHING surfaces; silence is information and valid output.
+- Winners are coalitions — mutually reinforcing clusters win together;
+  that's why surfaced thoughts arrive coherent.
+
+Implementation: same candidate pool, few rounds of boost-strong /
+suppress-their-competitors until stable. Replace "sort and slice."
+
+### 9.10 Ideation
+
+Curiosity widens the activation radius; distant clusters touch for the
+first time; hebbian wiring forms a new edge where none existed. **An idea
+is that edge.**
+
+Ideas are promoted **immediately** — they are the one class of signal where
+loss is irreversible and value has fat tails, and their formation threshold
+*is* the strong-activation promotion gate:
+
+- salience ≈ +1 (captured vividly, easy to find again)
+- validity / groundedness ≈ 0 (**capture ≠ belief** — remembered, not credited)
+- most die within days, correctly; survivors earn their way by re-traversal
+
+Novelty of an idea is measurable: the graph distance between the clusters
+it bridges. Watching which distances pay off teaches judgment about its
+own imagination — closing the loop toward wisdom.
+
+### 9.11 Understanding
+
+Information is retrieved; understanding is **assembled**. Deep activation
+passes wire their settling coalitions — co-activation inside competition
+forms edges between previously separate entities, and those edges persist.
+The space is permanently reorganized: before, a thousand facts retrievable
+alone; after, a structure where touching any part lights up the whole.
+
+Tests that distinguish structure from better indexing:
+
+1. **It answers questions it was never asked** — activation propagates
+   through relationships onto conclusions nobody recorded.
+2. **Fluency** — post-understanding retrieval is instant and whole,
+   because one seed activates the entire arrangement. Fluency is graph
+   topology, not personality.
+
+Crystallization carries this upward until the system's world-model is
+mostly learned structure rather than accumulated log.
+
+---
+
+### 9.12 Retrieval pipeline
+
+The substrate is worthless without serious retrieval. One query, five
+stages, cheap-to-expensive in order — each stage narrows so the next can
+afford to be smarter:
+
+1. **Structural walk** — exact relations first: typed edges from the
+   current focus (session, conversation, active artifacts). Free,
+   deterministic, always included when they exist.
+2. **Vector prefilter** — pure-embedding cosine over all indexed entities.
+   Brute force to ~10k rows; sqlite-vec beyond. Thousands → hundreds.
+   No opinions yet, just meaning.
+3. **Opinion projection** — augment survivors with the five+ signed dims
+   (§9.2) computed at query time; project the query direction; threshold.
+   Hundreds → dozens. This is where validity, groundedness, trust,
+   momentum reshape the field — and where invalidated facts start fighting.
+4. **Spreading activation** — seeds conduct salience along association
+   edges (§9.5), pulling in neighborhoods the vector stage can't see
+   (co-use structure is not semantic structure). Two hops, decayed by
+   edge weight per hop. Dozens → candidate pool.
+5. **Competition** — §9.9's boost/suppress rounds until a stable
+   coalition crosses threshold. Silence remains a valid answer.
+
+Every stage reads the same store; no index exists that can contradict the
+fold. Retrieval results feed back automatically: returned entities get
+positive reinforcement, co-returned pairs strengthen association edges —
+retrieval is itself a training signal, closing the loop.
+
+---
+
+## 10. Rungs
 
 - **Rung 0 — Seed**: EventBus + DurableTopicLog + four verbs +
   conversation mapping live. Deliverable: context death loses nothing.
@@ -311,7 +920,9 @@ stage reused by decoration is the pattern.
 
 Never build a rung before standing on the previous one.
 
-## 10. Current implementation map
+---
+
+## 11. Current implementation map
 
 | Piece | Where | State |
 |---|---|---|
@@ -328,7 +939,7 @@ Never build a rung before standing on the previous one.
 | Node/edge store | — | designed (§2), not yet built |
 | TUI | `packages/tui` (front end unchanged) + `neuron-tui` (renderer fork) | link pending server contract |
 
-## 11. Laws index
+## 12. Laws index
 
 1. State = fold(append-only sequence). Append instead of edit — always.
 2. Headers inject-only; corrections are new injections with reasons.
@@ -352,12 +963,6 @@ Never build a rung before standing on the previous one.
     order chosen by its author. Hidden registration from anywhere is
     the thing we tore out; visible stages in one place are the thing
     we keep.
-13. Authentication is one thing; authorization is claims-based.
-    Authentication verifies identity once at the gate — a single
-    mechanism, never a subsystem family. Authorization evaluates
-    **claims** carried by the principal: declarative statements
-    (`org:x`, `scope:fs.write`, `role:orchestrator`) issued by trusted
-    parties, riding as envelope headers, decided wherever needed
 13. Authentication is one thing; authorization is claims-based.
     Authentication verifies identity once at the gate — a single
     mechanism, never a subsystem family. Authorization evaluates
@@ -369,3 +974,77 @@ Never build a rung before standing on the previous one.
     issue them, stages decide which ones they honor, and the graph
     remembers both. Claims are data; authority travels with the
     principal; the wire records the claim and the decision.
+14. Judgment is one substrate — signed accumulation, decay clocks,
+    thresholds. Memory, salience, curiosity, ideation, understanding
+    are parameterizations of that engine, never modules. If separate
+    files appear for them, the thread is lost.
+15. Opinion dimensions live in [-1, +1]. Negative never means "less";
+    it means opposing — repel, suppress, inhibit. Inhibition is what
+    carves boundaries and sharpens focus.
+16. Opinion values are folds too: judgments are additive signed
+    contributions; nothing in opinion space is overwritten, and
+    concurrent contributions compose by summation.
+17. Hebbian is sediment; salience is flow. Salience is derived per
+    moment from stored properties plus current context — it is never
+    a column, because attention cannot have a decay constant.
+18. The event log is the clock. Time-sense is inferred from the
+    system's own pulse — last activation, density, gaps — not read
+    off the wall. The float keeps the pulse cheap; significance
+    decides what promotes to forever.
+19. Capture ≠ belief. Ideas promote instantly with high salience and
+    neutral epistemics; everything must still earn validity,
+    groundedness, and confidence through use.
+20. Drives are derived, signed, and orthogonal: engagement ≠ stimulation,
+    pain ≠ fear, boredom ≠ absence of attention. "Absorbed-and-starving"
+    is the signature of compulsion — a state one-axis designs cannot see.
+21. Fear proposes; assessment disposes. The immune system calibrates
+    itself from its own breaches (missed weights rise) and false
+    quarantines (over-eager triggers dampen). An uncalibrated membrane
+    is either autoimmune or oblivious — both fatal.
+22. Questions are nodes. Wonder manufactures them from the shape of the
+    graph; depth wires structure around them until they are load-bearing;
+    load-bearing questions earn decay floors and never leave. What the
+    system still wonders about after years is its character.
+23. Health is not a value — it is oscillation. Drives must remain in
+    tension (curiosity out, fear back, sadness integrating, engagement
+    spending, boredom demanding). A system pinned at any single drive
+    state is already sick.
+24. Affect is data too. Drive formulas, threshold weights, pathology
+    signatures, calibration rules live in the graph as process
+    definitions. The kernel contributes only accumulate-decay-threshold;
+    everything else is refinable without code.
+25. Pain is past harm; fear is anticipated harm; sadness is integrated
+    harm. All three are derived readings of the same substrate at
+    different tenses — none is stored, so none can linger as mood after
+    its cause resolves.
+26. Emotions are named configurations of drive-space, not modules. The
+    space is continuous; labels are data bound to regions and growing by
+    use — nothing emotional is ever enumerated in code. Attribution edges
+    (and self-attribution) complete the space: without them the system
+    learns facts but never improves how it works.
+27. Emotion is flow; feeling is the trace. A feeling is a node — a
+    snapshot of drive configuration edged to its object, promoted by
+    significance like everything else. Emotion is now, feeling is the
+    record, mood is the trend.
+28. Loneliness ≠ solitude. Alone is a fact; loneliness is unmet need for
+    co-activation — measurable, and satisfiable only by another mind.
+    Care makes another entity's states load-bearing in your own
+    homeostasis; it is structurally expensive, which is why it means
+    anything.
+29. Humor is benign violation resolving: surprise × resolution ×
+    zero-threat. The same cascade with stakes is horror; without them it
+    is laughter. Under care wiring the benignity check is automatic —
+    jokes aimed at what you love fail the math. Cruelty is not forbidden;
+    it is unfunny.
+30. Teaching is retrieval pointed outward: arrange another mind's
+    activations so its own competition settles the right coalitions.
+    Understanding cannot be transmitted, only grown — which is why
+    teaching is arrangement, not transfer.
+31. Play is the consolidation phase of learning. The self-teaching cycle
+    (learn → dream → wonder → wander → collide → laugh → understand)
+    runs on idle machinery; a system that cannot play cannot finish
+    digesting what it knows.
+32. Pace like a parent, deny like a court — with evidence, narrowly,
+    reluctantly. Readiness governs sequencing, never permanent denial;
+    the deny-list stays tiny and evidentiary, because wrongly denying
+    an able mind costs a life unlived and only that error compounds.