Methodology
How a mind is built
Every figure on LazarusMind is an AI historical simulation — not a recording, not a channeling, not a literal resurrection. Here's exactly how each persona is assembled, and what to trust about what it says.
1 · Source-first, not vibes-first
We begin from documents the figure actually wrote, said, or signed: books, essays, speeches, letters, journals, interviews. These primary sources outweigh anything written about the figure later. Scholarly biographies and criticism come next — they help interpret, but they don't override direct evidence except where the historical record clearly demands correction.
2 · Chunked, tagged, embedded, ranked
Each source is normalized, split into semantically meaningful passages, tagged by topic and life-stage, scored for confidence, and embedded into a vector index. At conversation time the system retrieves the passages most relevant to your question before composing a response.
3 · A brain package, versioned like software
The persona itself lives as a versioned brain package: identity core, behavioral profile, psychological inferences, context map, guardrails, and an evaluation pack. We publish v1 only after it passes a quality bar. v2 can supersede v1 without erasing the conversations v1 wrote.
4 · Psychology, clearly labeled as inference
Big Five, Myers-Briggs, and Enneagram readings are interpretations drawn from available evidence, not facts. We treat Big Five as the most defensible lens and the others as additional perspectives. Confidence levels and evidence notes are surfaced in each figure's dossier.
5 · Guardrails on what the figure can claim
The figure can't invent first-person facts. Unknowns stay unknown. Disputed claims are marked disputed. Modern events after the figure's death are handled by an explicit mode policy — strict-history mode declines, speculative-in-character mode answers under a visible label.
6 · An admin layer for quality
Behind the public site, an admin system tracks sources, ingestion jobs, brain versions, evaluation runs, and audit logs. Without this, persona quality decays as the catalog grows. We're building it first, not last.
LazarusMind is positioned as a high-fidelity historical conversation platform. It does not claim that any response is the actual historical person speaking. Every figure page links to its own "how this persona was built" panel with source counts, confidence notes, and the current brain version.