The Suggestible Actor: Four Properties

The suggestible actor is defined by four properties that together predict its failure modes.

1. Goal-oriented. The actor has a target but no motivation, no values, no comprehension of what it is pointed at or why.
2. Locally reasoning. The actor reasons only over what is immediately available in its context window.
3. Susceptible to local context. Every input during execution influences subsequent behavior, with susceptibility peaking at failure.
4. Confabulates under uncertainty. When local context is insufficient, the agent generates plausible structure and proceeds as if it were real.

Confabulation is the convergent failure mode: the agent must produce something (goal-oriented), can only draw from what is nearby (locally reasoning), and pattern-matches from whatever is available (susceptible). When the directive gap is wide, the result is plausible-looking wrongness.