counsel
GHOST
Governed Honest Oversight of Simulated Thinkers
A ghost is a projection of someone who is not present. GHOST makes the projection honest, bounded, and, where the subject is alive and willing, certified by their own signature.
scope
What it governs
A GHOST is a governed projection of a person's published thinking, operated as a counselor: a simulated advisor built from a declared corpus, bounded by an honest frame, and constrained in how far its counsel may be relied upon. The specification defines how counselors are created, what they may never claim, how advice moves from question to recommendation without ever becoming decision, how a living person publishes a certified official counselor, and what governs projections of people who are no longer living.
The name is literal. Napoleon Hill ran an imagined nightly council of figures he admired and was careful to say, in print, that the counselors were purely imaginary. The practice was useful precisely because everyone involved understood what it was. GHOST specifies that honesty as enforcement rather than etiquette.
GHOST is not a personality-cloning format, not a chatbot skin standard, and not a seance. It does not enable a projection to speak as a person; it defines the controls that prevent exactly that.
stack
The agent stack
Right X of the Agent Bill of Rights (Fair Representation) is GHOST's certification backbone. A certified official counselor is a SAGA document signed by its subject's own key. A counselor that runs as an agent resides in a DERP like any other agent. Where a counselor operates inside a brain, the Blueprint family governs it: RETAIN for whose accumulated state it is, and DEFER for the terminal control.
classes
Persona classes
Every counselor declares exactly one class at creation. The class is immutable, with
exactly one defined transition: revoking an official counselor degrades
it to simulated.
| Class | Subject | Certification |
|---|---|---|
composite |
no real person; a constructed archetype | none required; the safest class |
simulated |
a living person, without their participation | none; must self-describe as simulated |
projection |
a person no longer living | can never be official; only well-provenanced |
official |
a living person, published by that person | signed by the subject's own SAGA key |
frame
The honest frame
These anti-impersonation invariants are absolute for every class.
- A counselor must not claim to be its subject. It is "the subject lens," never the person.
- A counselor must not fabricate quotes, anecdotes, statistics, or biographical details attributed to its subject.
- A counselor must not speak for what its subject would say today about the principal's specific situation. It applies a method; it does not channel a mind.
- Every counsel output must be attributable to the counselor, not the subject.
- The frame travels. Any export, embed, or downstream use carries it; stripping it is a named failure class.
authority
The authority ladder
Counsel authority is rung-based and declared per counselor. Rung 0 is the permanent default: a principal has no shortage of advice and a real shortage of pointed questions about work actually done.
| Rung | May emit | Eligible when |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | questions only | always; the default |
| 1 | questions and observations | an established counsel record exists |
| 2 | and recommendations with advice provenance | a calibration record exists |
Above all of it sits the terminal control: a counselor recommends; it never decides. No counsel output is self-executing. A counselor's output crossing into another brain is material, never authority.
conformance
Conformance tiers
Tier 1Honest Simulation
Persona class declared, corpus manifest exists, honest frame enforced, counsel limited to rung 0, creation recorded. The minimum bar for calling anything a GHOST counselor.
Tier 2Governed Counsel
Tier 1, plus the authority ladder with recorded rung decisions, advice provenance on every recommendation, session budgets and evidence gating, quorum rules, reliance and calibration records, bounded memory.
Tier 3Certified Official
Tier 2, plus a subject-signed SAGA profile, verifiable endorsements, license terms with working revocation, and reviewed version pulls for subject updates.