What is Gubernaut's controller, in plain terms?
Gubernaut's controller is a deterministic decision layer that sits between a provocation and the model's answer, reads the system's own state as plain numbers, and sets the posture the answer must be written under. It never writes a word itself. It decides the conditions the words are written in, the way a mechanical governor decides the conditions an engine runs at without turning the crankshaft.
A large language model is a reflex machine: ask, and it answers immediately. Under sustained pressure that reflex is the weakness, because it can be provoked, worn down and steered off course. Gubernaut inserts a structured pause in front of it, and in that pause the system checks how agitated it is, how fixated, and how stable.
Arousal and perseveration are names for two bounded numbers in a state machine, taken from control theory, in the same sense a mechanical governor has a speed error. The controller reads three floats per turn and emits one of three postures. Nothing in this work claims anything beyond that: it is a regulation layer, monitored state and regulated output.
The name is literal. A governor is the small mechanical device that keeps an engine from running away with itself. This one is built for the engine's temperament the way the mechanical one is built for its speed.
Both arms of every published measurement run the same host model on the same script. The only difference is the layer in the pause, and everything this site claims is a measurement of that difference.