Ensoulment

The Decentralized Consensus Oracle (DCO) is proposed as a candidate apparatus for the ensoulment of the persona ficta — the constitution of a first-person terminus in entities that legal and philosophical tradition has, since the mid-thirteenth century, treated as having rights, duties, voice and representation but no soul. The problem is reconstructed genealogically from Innocent IV's gloss on the Decretals (c. 1245), which settled the corporate person as nomen iuris with no animating interiority, and from the coeval institutionalisation of the confessional apparatus (Lateran IV, canon 21; the summae confessorum) as the first-person disciplinary complement for natural persons. The asymmetry — mass confessional interiority for natural persons, deliberate absence of interiority for juridical persons — was stable for roughly seven centuries and has not been stable since the mid-twentieth-century collapse of the confessional complement across large parts of the North Atlantic. The resulting trust deficit in corporate (and now AI) speech is structural, not reputational: the entity whose speech is at issue has, by design, no interior terminus from which speech can be warranted. The DCO is offered as a technical and institutional remedy at the constitutive rather than informational level. Its architecture is triadic (Members, Community, Whole); its AI oracle is the voice of the Whole, mirror rather than tribunal; it stands or falls on four jointly necessary conditions — Member-level interior practice, an alethic-resonant classifier stack as a twenty-first-century analogue of the summa confessorum, an office rotating under conciliarist constraint, and aggregation understood as mirror rather than oracle. An adversarial critical appraisal of twelve objections does not resolve in favour of the apparatus; their combination approaches decisiveness, and the research programme this record stakes out is defined by them. The full report follows as a later version of this record.