---
slug: confabulation
name: Confabulation
one_liner: "Fill a gap in the record with fluent, plausible, and confidently-held content that is not grounded in the actual input — the ungrounded-fabrication pole of the completion axis whose grounded pole is pattern completion."
type: prime
schema_version: 2
status: density_v2_draft
categories: [cognitive, epistemic, computational]
origin_domain: cognitive_neuroscience
alternate_origin_domains: [memory_research, clinical_neurology, artificial_intelligence, epistemology]
aliases: [fabrication, plausible_gap_filling, ungrounded_completion, honest_lying, false_memory_construction]
related: []
solution_archetypes: []
review_flags:
- "OPERATOR-DERIVED (op-01 dualization, sub-flavor 1c) — the ungrounded/failure-mode dual of `pattern_completion` along the completion-grounding axis (completion faithful to the whole vs. completion untethered from the actual input). Discovered in the op-01 full sweep 2026-07-03. Verified absent via search_prime + slug check. Directly relevant to LLM hallucination. STATUS: RECOMMENDED ACCEPT."
- "Created 2026-07-03; STUB ONLY (frontmatter + Core Idea + Notes). Did NOT go through Phase-A triage. SI/SF/similarity grades are PROPOSER ESTIMATES pending triangulation. Body sections (Structural Signature onward) NOT yet written."
- "Phase-C action: re-similarity-check vs `pattern_completion`, and against any hallucination / overfitting / motivated-reasoning / narrative-construction prime to confirm confabulation is the distinct failure-mode structure and not a redescription of pattern_completion's cost; draw the sibling/failure-mode edge to `pattern_completion` and the LLM-hallucination cross-link at incorporation. Sync one_liner to a v1 draft per CLAUDE.md before merge."
substrate_independence:
  composite_substrate_independence: 4
  domain_breadth: 4
  structural_abstraction: 4
  transfer_evidence: 3
  reasoning: 'The structure — a gap-filling system that produces fluent, plausible, confidently-held output not constrained by the actual missing content, so the completion is generated from priors alone with no grounding check — is largely medium-neutral and demonstrably recurs across substrates: clinical confabulation in amnesic and split-brain patients, everyday false-memory construction and post-hoc rationalization in healthy cognition, and hallucination/ungrounded generation in large language models. That cross-substrate recurrence (neurology, healthy memory, social cognition, AI) gives it a domain breadth of 4 and structural abstraction of 4. It leans slightly cognitive — the "confidently held / experienced as genuine" component references an experiencing system — and the sharpest formal characterization is still emerging, so transfer evidence is 3 and the composite is 4: a strongly-but-not-purely substrate-independent failure-mode structure.'
similarity_to_nearest_existing_prime:
  slug: pattern_completion
  similarity: 0.62
structural_framed:
  label: mixed-structural
  aggregate: 0.28
  criteria: {vocab_travels: 0.5, evaluative_weight: 0.3, institutional_origin: 0.2, human_practice_bound: 0.2, import_vs_recognize: 0.3}
  rationale: 'The core — an unconstrained gap-fill that is fluent, plausible, and confidently held but ungrounded in the actual input — is a describable structural operation that runs in brains and in artificial inference systems with no human practice required, so institutional-origin and human-practice-bound read low. It carries a mild evaluative tint (confabulation is named as an error/failure, and "confidently but wrongly" imports a light normative charge) and the term travels somewhat as a term of art from neuropsychology, which lifts vocab_travels and import_vs_recognize off zero. Net: mixed-structural, leaning structural.'
phase_b_passes_completed: []
---
# Confabulation

## Core Idea

Confabulation is the pattern in which a gap-filling system *produces fluent, internally plausible, and confidently-held content that is not grounded in the actual missing material* — the completion is generated from priors, context, and the drive for coherence, but with no faithful contact with what the absent portion really was. It is one pole of the *completion-grounding* axis whose opposite pole is `pattern_completion`: both take incomplete input and reconstruct a coherent whole from stored regularities, but pattern completion's reconstruction is *tethered* — it recovers, or at least tracks, the true missing structure — whereas confabulation's reconstruction is *untethered* — it manufactures a plausible whole that the system then treats as if given. The distinguishing move is not that a gap is filled (both poles do that) but that the fill is emitted with the same confidence and phenomenology as grounded content while lacking the grounding, so the system cannot tell, and does not signal, that it invented the material.

The structure has three load-bearing commitments. First, there is an *unmarked gap*: some portion of the record is missing, occluded, or unavailable, and — crucially — the system does not represent it *as* missing. Second, there is a *prior-driven fill*: the completion is produced from stored regularities and the pressure toward a coherent, expected whole, so it is maximally plausible-looking; plausibility, not accuracy, is what governs it. Third, there is *confident, unmarked emission*: the fabricated content is delivered with normal fluency and (in experiencing systems) is subjectively indistinguishable from remembered or perceived fact — no uncertainty flag, no "this is a guess." The characteristic payoff is *seamless coherence*: the system presents an unbroken, usable whole and never stalls on a gap, which is exactly why the mechanism is adaptive as ordinary pattern completion. The characteristic cost — the reason confabulation is the failure pole — is *ungrounded confidence*: the output is plausible and assured but false, and because the fabrication carries no marker distinguishing it from grounded content, it propagates as though it were evidence. The defining tension is therefore between *coherence-under-incompleteness* and *faithfulness-to-the-actual*: a system built to always deliver a complete, plausible whole will, whenever grounding is absent, deliver a complete plausible whole anyway — confidently and indistinguishably — which is precisely confabulation.

Read as a structure rather than a clinical label, the same pattern recurs across substrates. In *clinical neurology* it is the confabulation of amnesic (Korsakoff), split-brain, and anosognosic patients who narrate detailed, sincere accounts of events that never occurred, produced by an interpreter that fills the gap the damaged system leaves. In *healthy memory and social cognition* it is everyday false-memory construction and post-hoc rationalization — reporting a reason for a choice one did not actually make on that basis, told with full sincerity. In *artificial inference systems* it is the large-language-model *hallucination*: fluent, plausible, confidently-asserted output — a citation, a fact, an API — that has no grounding in the training data or the query, generated because the model completes toward likely-looking text with no faithfulness constraint. Across all three the recognizable skeleton is identical: an unmarked gap, a plausibility-driven fill, and confident unmarked emission that the system cannot itself flag as invented.

## Notes

**Provenance.** Produced by the op-01 dualization operator, sub-flavor 1c, as the *ungrounded / failure-mode dual* of `pattern_completion` along the completion-grounding axis: pattern completion recovers the true missing structure, confabulation manufactures a plausible substitute untethered from it. Surfaced in the op-01 full sweep on 2026-07-03 and marked ACCEPT in the manifest.

**For owner evaluation (keep/cut).** The case FOR: confabulation names a distinct, high-value structure — the *failure pole* of an operation the corpus already holds (`pattern_completion`) — and it has strong, independent cross-substrate evidence (clinical neurology, healthy memory/social cognition, and AI), which is exactly the convergence signal an emergent prime wants. Its direct relevance to *LLM hallucination* makes it a load-bearing, currently-topical abstraction that the corpus would otherwise lack a clean home for. It is an established term of art in memory and neuropsychology, not a coinage, and its structural-framed estimate (~0.28, mixed-structural) sits on the admissible side of the bar. The specific risks Kurt should weigh: (1) **failure-mode-vs-prime question** — is confabulation a genuine standalone prime, or is it *the cost side of `pattern_completion`* redescribed? The draft argues it is distinct because the grounding-vs-plausibility distinction and the *unmarked-confident-emission* component are not present in pattern completion's own anatomy, but this is the sharpest hold consideration and warrants an explicit call. (2) **Screen overlap** — check against any existing prime for hallucination, overfitting (fitting noise/priors rather than signal), motivated reasoning, or narrative/coherence construction; confabulation may sit close to several and the boundaries (plausibility over accuracy; *confident unmarked* emission) must be drawn to keep it distinct. (3) **Mild framing tint** — "confabulation" is named as an error, so a light evaluative charge rides along; the structural read (unconstrained gap-fill emitted as grounded) is what should carry the prime, with the pathology as one instance.

**At incorporation.** Re-run similarity against `pattern_completion` (the dual) and against any hallucination / overfitting / motivated-reasoning / narrative-construction prime to confirm the failure-mode structure is distinct and not a redescription. Draw the sibling / failure-pole edge to `pattern_completion` (two poles of the completion-grounding axis) and add the LLM-hallucination cross-link at incorporation. Write a v1 draft and sync the one_liner across v1 and v2 per CLAUDE.md before merge.
