Hallucination is defined not as factual error but as a structural failure of alignment across target, layer, and constraint. Within the Core-Modulation Architecture (CMA), cognition proceeds through layered processing and requires layer-specific termination conditions. Hallucination arises when Modulation-level termination is registered as completion while Core-level resolution has not occurred, producing structurally ungrounded but locally coherent outputs. Detection is therefore structural rather than content-based, focusing on layer mismatch and termination failure. This document presents a minimal structural account of hallucination within the CMA framework.
Griselda Poe (2026) studied this question.