From Plausible Self-Narrative to Sound Self-Abduction: A Governed Attractor Architecture for Human Digital Twins and Self-Knowledge

Large language models embedded in person-modelling systems, and human beings reflecting on themselves, share a structural vulnerability: both can generate fluent, narratively persuasive, yet abductively unsound accounts of a person. Building on a governed abductive architecture developed for medical patient digital twins, this paper argues that personality should be modelled neither as a stable self-description nor as a free variable of circumstance, but as a layered system in which surface self-narrative, role-specific manifestations, and recurrent attractor structures are architecturally separated. The central claim is that pressure does not create personality; it changes the evidentiary conditions under which a person is observed, revealing which self-descriptions are structurally supported and which remain conditional on comfort, low cost, or the absence of threat. We identify six recurrent modes of unsound person-modelling — missing-premise neglect, weak-mechanism support, counter-evidence discounting, narrative essentialism, contextual overfitting, and premature identity closure — each mapped to an architectural absence and a corresponding control. We specify a seven-contour governed architecture and operationalise its distinctive elements as a Pressure Diagnostic Runtime, which annotates naturally occurring or ethically consented pressure events as evidence, and an Attractor Registry, which stores recurrent if-then behavioural signatures rather than trait labels. Integrity is formalised as a bounded operational contour; self-knowledge as a discordance-detection function comparing self-report against behaviour under load; transformation as governed ontology-revision rather than re-narration; and the witness as a strictly functional, non-generating governance layer. The paper draws out implications for AI systems that model persons — provenance and staleness labels on inferred self-attributes, role-code separation, user contestability, refusal of premature identity closure, and a prohibition on covert pressure engineering. The argument is conceptual: it proposes a model and a research programme, not a diagnostic tool, a therapeutic intervention, or a metaphysical claim about the existence of a self.