Core Concept Papers
This collection brings together fourteen canonical concept papers developed between 2023 and 2026. Together, they define the central concepts of the Reality Drift framework and describe how representations, systems, and cognition can remain functional and internally coherent while gradually losing corrective contact with the conditions they are meant to track.
The papers are organized into four areas: framework foundations, system dynamics, meaning and representation, and cognition and experience.
Framework Foundations
Reality Drift — Concept Paper (PDF)
Defines Reality Drift as the condition in which a system remains operational and internally coherent while the representations guiding it progressively lose corrective contact with the reality they are meant to track, describe, or govern.
The Drift Principle — Concept Paper (PDF)
Presents the core principle that representations can be compressed, optimized, distributed, and reused faster than real-world conditions can correct them.
The Age of Drift — Concept Paper (PDF)
Describes the broader systemic condition in which Reality Drift becomes an increasingly common operating environment across institutions, technologies, culture, and human cognition.
System Dynamics
Optimization Trap — Concept Paper (PDF)
Describes the condition in which improvement within a representation becomes easier to demonstrate and reward than improvement in the underlying reality, causing misalignment to reinforce itself as apparent success.
Constraint Collapse — Concept Paper (PDF)
Explains what happens when feedback, consequence, and correction remain present but lose their ability to enforce change, allowing misalignment to persist without stopping the system.
Recursive Compression — Concept Paper (PDF)
Describes how simplified representations are preserved, reused, and fed into later cycles of interpretation, modeling, or action, enabling both cumulative intelligence and cumulative loss.
Temporal Drift — Concept Paper (PDF)
Examines the loss of alignment between system time and real-world time as feedback, consequences, updates, and decision cycles fall out of sync.
Meaning and Representation
Semantic Fidelity — Concept Paper (PDF)
Defines the degree to which a representation preserves the meaning, intent, context, distinctions, and referential relationships necessary for its intended use.
Semantic Drift — Concept Paper (PDF)
Describes how meaning progressively changes or degrades as representations move across contexts, systems, summaries, incentives, and repeated reuse.
Synthetic Realness — Concept Paper (PDF)
Examines how optimized representations can produce stronger signals of credibility, completeness, or authenticity than the less polished realities they represent.
Cognition and Experience
Filter Fatigue — Concept Paper (PDF)
Describes the cognitive exhaustion produced by continuous relevance filtering in environments filled with personalized, abundant, and plausible representations.
Cognitive Drift — Concept Paper (PDF)
Describes how human cognition can remain active and coherent while becoming increasingly dependent on mediated inputs, compressed representations, and recursive internal models rather than direct grounding.
The Drifted Self — Concept Paper (PDF)
Examines how identity can remain functional and adaptive while progressively losing continuity, grounding, and internal coherence under accelerated and mediated environments.
Co-Cognition — Concept Paper (PDF)
Describes the shared feedback loop through which human cognition and external systems, particularly AI, jointly generate, refine, and apply representations.