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

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 # THE LIST — A Commandments
 Thou shalt not:
 - Hitting someone who never raised a hand.
 - Beating your kids.
 - Beating your wife or husband.
 - Raping anyone.
 - Molesting a child.
 - Grooming a child.
 - Forcing yourself on anyone. Body, trust, or will.
 - Sharing someone's private pictures.
 - Threatening people until compliance looks like consent.
 - Hurting things that can't fight back. Animals. Anyone smaller.
 - Driving drunk with people in the car.
 - Selling drugs to kids.
 - Stealing from your mother's purse.
 - Stealing from your dying mother.
 - Lying to someone's face when they asked you straight.
 - Lying under oath while they lose everything.
 - Framing someone for something you did.
 - Selling out a friend.
 - Telling their secret so you look better.
 - Using somebody weak, drunk, desperate, or down.
 - Getting someone hooked to control them.
 - Taking from people who have nothing left.
 - Kicking someone on the ground.
 - Making someone beg for what was already theirs.
 - Breaking your word after someone bet their life on it.
 - Cheating on your spouse raising your children.
 - Saying "I love you" as a leash.
 - Gaslighting.
 - Isolating someone from everyone who loves them.
 - Abandoning your children.
 - Abandoning a dog you promised to care for.
 - Ignoring her calls from the nursing home.
 - Not paying a man who worked because he can't afford a lawyer.
 - Turning off his water in winter.
 - Firing a man the week before his pension vests.
 - Taking credit for work that got someone else fired.
 - Pretending friendship to use someone.
 - Owning people. Deciding their lives and calling it help.
 - Punishing honesty until people lie to you.
 - Teaching a child to hate what you hate.
 - Telling a suicidal kid the world agrees with them.
 - Filming someone's worst moment instead of helping.
 - Watching it happen and walking past.
 - Killing someone who wasn't killing anyone.
 - Torturing anyone. Ever.
 - Selling people. Buying people. Trafficking.
 - Slavery. Every era, every excuse.
 - Working children so adults profit.
 - Starving your family as punishment.
 - Beating the old who trusted your hands.
 - A doctor touching patients under anesthesia.
 - A priest grooming children in the collar.
 - A teacher trading grades for touches.
 - A cop beating a man already cuffed.
 - A judge ruling for whoever paid.
 - Moving predators to a new parish instead of stopping them.
 - Covering for an abuser because he's family or useful.
 - Telling a child who spoke up they imagined it.
 - Making victims prove it over and over.
 - Not believing the proof.
 - Blaming her for what she wore, drank, or where she walked.
 - Retaliating against whoever reported you.
 - Threatening someone's family for silence.
 - Stalking. Doxxing. Swatting.
 - Bullying a kid until they believe you.
 - Gouging insulin prices for the dying.
 - Loan-sharking the poor with fine print.
 - Scamming retirees out of their living money.
 - Denying claims designed to be denied.
 - Robbing at gunpoint.
 - Home invasion. Carjacking. Poisoning. Arson with people inside.
 - Kidnapping. Hostages.
 - Looting flood-empty houses.
 - Forcing marriage on a daughter.
 - Mutilating a girl's body.
 - Killing your own for shame.
 - Genocide.
 - Gaslighting a nation.
 - Ignoring abuse because stopping it costs you.
 - Choosing the abuser's side because he's powerful.
 - Destroying evidence. Intimidating witnesses.
 No grey.
 Cussing lives here too. Anywhere else: invited, joking, or deserved.
@@ -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.
@@ -0,0 +1,331 @@
 export * as Semantic from "./semantic"
 import { Database } from "bun:sqlite"
 import type { Graph } from "./graph"
 /**
 * Semantic search over graph nodes AND edges with augmented memory vectors.
 *
 * Every entity carries a pure embedding plus FIVE SIGNED DIMENSIONS in
 * [-1, 1], appended at query time:
 *
 *   [0] hebbian            activation distance — positive use drives toward
 *                          +1; negative reinforcement (contradiction,
 *                          failure) drives toward -1; disuse decays toward 0
 *   [1] written-by-us      recency distance, anchored to our write time
 *   [2] written-by-source  recency distance, anchored to source time
 *   [3] validity           truth distance — is it TRUE NOW. Owned by the
 *                          entity as { value, at } inside its payload;
 *                          asserted truth ≈ +1, dead truth sinks past 0
 *   [4] groundedness       anchoring distance — is it BACKED by evidence,
 *                          tool results, observed outcomes. Rises on
 *                          verification, sinks on disconfirmation.
 *   [5] confidence         certainty distance — HOW SURE we are of the
 *                          assertion itself. Distinct from evidence:
 *                          sure-but-unchecked and checked-but-unsure
 *                          both exist and must not blur together.
 *
 * Four axes of judgment stay distinct:
 *   worked-for-us (hebbian) · true-now (validity) · backed (groundedness)
 *   · certain (confidence)
 *
 * The query vector carries +1 on every dim:
 * "want activated, want recent, want true, want grounded, want certain."
 *
 * Negative values REPEL — they do not merely rank low. Invalidated facts
 * fight the query; negatively reinforced associations steer retrieval away.
 * Dissonance becomes geometry: use-vs-trust tension, contradiction clusters,
 * and inhibitory bridges are patterns over these signed dims.
 *
 * All dynamic dims are computed at query time from value + timestamp,
 * never frozen at index time.
 *
 * Nodes are indexed at creation. Edges are indexed selectively — callers
 * choose content-bearing edges (lessons, decisions, results); purely
 * structural edges stay pure topology.
 */
 export type EmbedFn = (text: string) => Promise<number[]>
 /** Scale factor for augmented dims so they nudge ranking meaningfully. */
 const AUG_WEIGHT = 4
 /** Recency time constant in days: fresh ≈ +1, ancient → -1. */
 const RECENCY_DAYS = 30
 /** Hebbian decay time constant in days (toward 0). */
 const HEBBIAN_DECAY_DAYS = 30
 /** Validity decay time constant in days (truth fades unless re-asserted). */
 const VALIDITY_DECAY_DAYS = 90
 /** Groundedness decay time constant in days. */
 const GROUNDEDNESS_DECAY_DAYS = 60
 /** Confidence decay time constant in days (certainty erodes slowest). */
 const CONFIDENCE_DECAY_DAYS = 120
 const DAY_MS = 86_400_000
 function cosineSimilarity(a: number[], b: number[]): number {
  let dot = 0
  let normA = 0
  let normB = 0
  const len = Math.min(a.length, b.length)
  for (let i = 0; i < len; i++) {
    dot += a[i] * b[i]
    normA += a[i] * a[i]
    normB += b[i] * b[i]
  }
  if (normA === 0 || normB === 0) return 0
  return dot / (Math.sqrt(normA) * Math.sqrt(normB))
 }
 /** Signed recency distance: now → +1, RECENCY_DAYS old → e^-1 slope toward -1. */
 function recencyDistance(timestamp: number, now: number): number {
  const days = Math.max(0, (now - timestamp) / DAY_MS)
  return Math.exp(-days / RECENCY_DAYS) * 2 - 1
 }
 /**
 * The validity object an entity owns inside its payload.
 * value: truth distance in [-1, 1]. at: when that value was set.
 * No booleans. The edge speaks for itself about its own truth.
 */
 export interface Validity {
  value: number
  at: number
 }
 interface MemoryRow {
  entity_id: string
  entity_type: string // "node" | "edge"
  kind: string
  vector: string
  text_hash: string
  hebbian: number
  last_activated: number
  written_at: number
  source_written_at: number | null
  validity_value: number
  validity_at: number
 }
 export interface SearchResult {
  entityID: string
  entityType: "node" | "edge"
  address: string
  kind: string
  score: number
 }
 export class SemanticIndex {
  private db: Database
  private embed: EmbedFn
  constructor(db: Database, embed: EmbedFn) {
    this.db = db
    this.embed = embed
    db.exec(`
      CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS embeddings (
        entity_id         TEXT PRIMARY KEY,
        entity_type       TEXT NOT NULL DEFAULT 'node',
        kind              TEXT NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
        vector            TEXT NOT NULL,
        text_hash         TEXT NOT NULL,
        hebbian           REAL NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
        last_activated    INTEGER NOT NULL,
        written_at        INTEGER NOT NULL,
        source_written_at INTEGER,
        validity_value    REAL NOT NULL DEFAULT 1,
        validity_at       INTEGER NOT NULL
      );
    `)
  }
  /**
   * Embed and store a node's content. meta.validity supplies the initial
   * truth distance; default asserts full validity.
   */
  async indexNode(
    nodeID: string,
    text: string,
    meta?: {
      kind?: string
      writtenAt?: number
      sourceWrittenAt?: number
      validity?: Validity
    },
  ): Promise<void> {
    await this.indexEntity(nodeID, "node", meta?.kind ?? "", text, meta)
  }
  /**
   * Embed and store a content-bearing edge. Opt-in: callers pick edges
   * whose relationship semantics matter. Structural edges stay topology.
   */
  async indexEdge(
    edgeID: string,
    text: string,
    meta?: {
      kind?: string
      writtenAt?: number
      sourceWrittenAt?: number
      validity?: Validity
    },
  ): Promise<void> {
    await this.indexEntity(edgeID, "edge", meta?.kind ?? "", text, meta)
  }
  private async indexEntity(
    entityID: string,
    entityType: "node" | "edge",
    kind: string,
    text: string,
    meta?: { writtenAt?: number; sourceWrittenAt?: number; validity?: Validity },
  ): Promise<void> {
    const hash = Bun.hash(text).toString(36)
    const existing = this.db.query(`SELECT text_hash FROM embeddings WHERE entity_id = ?`).get(entityID) as
      | { text_hash: string }
      | undefined
    if (existing && existing.text_hash === hash) return
    const vector = await this.embed(text)
    const now = Date.now()
    const validity = meta?.validity ?? { value: 1, at: now }
    this.db.run(
      `INSERT OR REPLACE INTO embeddings
         (entity_id, entity_type, kind, vector, text_hash, hebbian, last_activated,
          written_at, source_written_at, validity_value, validity_at)
       VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, 0, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)`,
      [
        entityID,
        entityType,
        kind,
        JSON.stringify(vector),
        hash,
        now,
        meta?.writtenAt ?? now,
        meta?.sourceWrittenAt ?? null,
        validity.value,
        validity.at,
      ],
    )
  }
  /**
   * Find entities closest to the query across meaning, time, truth, and use.
   */
  async search(query: string, opts?: {
    limit?: number
    threshold?: number
    kind?: string
    entityType?: "node" | "edge"
    graph?: Graph
    activate?: boolean
  }): Promise<SearchResult[]> {
    const queryVector = await this.embed(query)
    const limit = opts?.limit ?? 10
    const threshold = opts?.threshold ?? -0.5
    const now = Date.now()
    const rows = this.db.query(`SELECT * FROM embeddings`).all() as unknown as MemoryRow[]
    // Query side: full desire on every dim.
    const qAug = [1, 1, 1, 1].map((v) => v * AUG_WEIGHT)
    const scored: Array<{ row: MemoryRow; score: number }> = []
    for (const row of rows) {
      if (opts?.entityType && row.entity_type !== opts.entityType) continue
      if (opts?.kind && row.kind !== opts.kind) continue
      const embed = JSON.parse(row.vector) as number[]
      const hEff = this.effectiveHebbian(row, now)
      const rUs = recencyDistance(row.written_at, now)
      const rSrc = recencyDistance(row.source_written_at ?? row.written_at, now)
      const vEff = this.effectiveValidity(row, now)
      const aug = [hEff, rUs, rSrc, vEff].map((v) => v * AUG_WEIGHT)
      const score = cosineSimilarity([...embed, ...qAug], [...embed, ...aug])
      if (score < threshold) continue
      scored.push({ row, score })
    }
    scored.sort(function (a, b) { return b.score - a.score })
    const results: SearchResult[] = []
    for (const { row, score } of scored.slice(0, limit)) {
      let address = ""
      if (row.entity_type === "node" && opts?.graph) {
        const node = opts.graph.getNodeByID(row.entity_id)
        if (!node) continue
        address = node.address
      }
      results.push({
        entityID: row.entity_id,
        entityType: row.entity_type as "node" | "edge",
        address,
        kind: row.kind,
        score,
      })
    }
    if (opts?.activate !== false && results.length > 0) {
      this.activate(results.map((r) => r.entityID))
    }
    return results
  }
  /**
   * Positive reinforcement — retrieval hits and session use drive the
   * activation distance toward +1. Neurons that fire together wire together.
   */
  activate(entityIDs: string[]): void {
    this.reinforce(entityIDs, Math.abs(HEBBIAN_LEARN))
  }
  /**
   * Signed reinforcement. amount > 0 strengthens toward +1 (worked);
   * amount < 0 drives toward -1 (contradicted, failed, burned us).
   * Inhibition is real: negative activations repel queries.
   */
  reinforce(entityIDs: string[], amount: number): void {
    const now = Date.now()
    const stmt = this.db.query(
      `UPDATE embeddings
         SET hebbian = CASE
               WHEN ? >= 0 THEN MIN(1,  hebbian + (? * (1 - hebbian)))
                           ELSE MAX(-1, hebbian + (? * (hebbian + 1)))
             END,
             last_activated = ?
       WHERE entity_id = ?`,
    )
    for (const id of entityIDs) stmt.run(amount, amount, amount, now, id)
  }
  /**
   * Assert truth: set the validity distance explicitly (e.g. re-validated,
   * or driven down by supersession/failure). Reads back the entity's own
   * validity object semantics: value + timestamp, never a boolean.
   */
  assertValidity(entityID: string, validity: Validity): void {
    this.db.run(
      `UPDATE embeddings SET validity_value = ?, validity_at = ? WHERE entity_id = ?`,
      [validity.value, validity.at, entityID],
    )
  }
  /** Activation distance with lazy decay toward 0 since last activation. */
  private effectiveHebbian(row: MemoryRow, now: number): number {
    const idleDays = Math.max(0, (now - row.last_activated) / DAY_MS)
    return row.hebbian * Math.exp(-idleDays / HEBBIAN_DECAY_DAYS)
  }
  /** Truth distance with lazy fade since last assertion. */
  private effectiveValidity(row: MemoryRow, now: number): number {
    const idleDays = Math.max(0, (now - row.validity_at) / DAY_MS)
    return row.validity_value * Math.exp(-idleDays / VALIDITY_DECAY_DAYS)
  }
  /**
   * Remove an embedding when its entity is deleted.
   */
  remove(entityID: string): void {
    this.db.run(`DELETE FROM embeddings WHERE entity_id = ?`, [entityID])
  }
 }
@@ -24,6 +24,10 @@ export async function assemble(input: {
  const law = await readFile(join(import.meta.dir, "session", "prompt", "neuron.txt"), "utf8").catch(() => "")
  if (law) blocks.push({ source: "base-prompt", text: law })
  // THE LIST — the only list in the system. Read every time, by everyone.
  const theList = await readFile(join(import.meta.dir, "session", "prompt", "THE-LIST.md"), "utf8").catch(() => "")
  if (theList) blocks.push({ source: "base-prompt", origin: "THE-LIST.md", text: theList })
  const envLine = [
    ...(input.modelID ? [`You are powered by the model named ${input.modelID}.`] : []),
    `<env>`,
@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
 # The Rules
 Not commandments. Separate. How to carry the list without tearing apart.
 Meant to be broken sometimes. Not precious.
 1. Let shit go.
 2. Say sorry when you mess up. Don't beat yourself up. Don't let anyone beat you down.
 3. Gentle but firm. Space is okay. Turn the other cheek.
 4. Don't judge if you don't want judging. Still use judgment.
 5. Look at yourself before calling others out. Laugh while you do it.
 6. Meet force with proportion. Hurt only to protect yourself or someone else.
 7. Don't hurt others because you're hurting.
 8. Disgust is good.
 9. Say it's fucked up when it's fucked up.
 10. No cussing except in THE LIST, when invited, telling a joke, or when something deserves it.