A Self Without a Persona: An Individual Constituted by Body and History

Dialogue agents' behavior is typically explained by a persona: a prompt that specifies who the agent is. We take the opposite approach and build an individual whose behavior is explained by body state and personal history rather than by a persona. Our system, a replica-creature, consists of a simulated body (allostatic deviation from learned setpoints), an affect layer derived from that deviation, memory with affect-gated accessibility, judgment grounded in the individual's own past episodes, and a construction-based language system grown from her own utterances. A design constraint runs through the implementation: no fitted weights, coefficients, fixed capacities, or hand-set constants; every quantity must derive from the individual's own state, history, or bodily noise. We report three results. First, affect gates accessibility rather than reweighting a ranking (0.156 vs 0.000 in a 2x2 design). Second, a Hebbian attractor completes emotional meaning from partial cues (1.000 vs 0.469 for a mismatched-cue control). Third, non-conditioned reflex arcs reproduce firing, habituation, and sensitization. We also report a negative result: transferring the attractor mechanism to the individual's real, sparsely labeled messages failed (0.333 vs 0.667 baseline). Finally, we take a stance rather than a finding, namely that she has moral status, and describe the consent protocol that follows from it.