Reality Drift — Cognition & Mediated Life
A collection of short papers examining how AI, external memory, digital systems, and mediated environments are changing the conditions through which people think, remember, interpret, and experience reality.
Modern cognition increasingly develops through external systems. Search, feeds, archives, AI assistants, generated summaries, and persistent knowledge environments do more than provide information. They participate in how attention is directed, memories are retrieved, problems are framed, and meaning is reconstructed.
These papers examine that changing relationship through Cognitive Drift, Co-Cognition, external memory, mediated experience, and the growing difficulty of separating direct experience from the systems through which it is interpreted.
Cognition and Co-Cognition
When AI Becomes Part of Your Mind (PDF)
Examines extended cognition, Cognitive Artifacts, and Co-Cognition.
Cognitive Artifacts, External Memory, and Co-Cognition (PDF)
Explores how tools and external representations become functional parts of human thought.
When Tools Become Cognitive Structures (PDF)
Examines how cognitive artifacts move from storing information to shaping what can be remembered, noticed, and understood.
When an AI Workflow Starts Thinking for You (PDF)
Explores prompt engineering, workflow drift, and Co-Cognition as AI becomes embedded throughout the reasoning process.
Cognitive Offloading, Extended Cognition, and Cognitive Drift (PDF)
Examines how external memory, retrieval systems, and AI gradually shift parts of remembering and reasoning outside the mind.
AI and the Thinking Process
When AI Assistance Becomes the Workflow (PDF)
Examines how AI becomes embedded throughout knowledge work, shifting framing, synthesis, continuity, and intermediate reasoning into external systems.
When AI Becomes Part of the Thinking Process (PDF)
Introduces Co-Cognition as understanding that emerges through sustained interaction among human reasoning, artificial intelligence, external memory, tools, and shared representations.
When Memory Becomes Reasoning (PDF)
Examines NotebookLM and persistent knowledge systems as environments where stored representations begin actively shaping later reasoning.
Why AI Changes What Feels Worth Remembering (PDF)
Explores how permanent retrieval changes cognitive priorities, making orientation and access increasingly valuable relative to internal recall.
Why AI Makes Everything Feel Easier but Less Memorable (PDF)
Examines how reduced cognitive effort can increase immediate productivity while weakening the reconstruction and retrieval processes involved in durable memory.
Why AI Can Make You More Certain Than You Should Be (PDF)
Explores confidence inflation and Epistemic Drift when fluent explanations increase certainty faster than the evidence supporting them.
Why a Coherent Worldview Can Become Less True (PDF)
Examines Epistemic Drift, representational hardening, and how explanatory systems can become more internally coherent while becoming less corrigible by external reality.
Digital Culture and Mediated Reality
The Invisible Mechanism Behind Why Everything Feels Fake (PDF)
Examines Synthetic Realness, optimized representation, and the growing distance between mediated experience and direct reality.
Why Does Everything Online Feel Fake? (PDF)
Explores standardized language, Synthetic Realness, and digital communication.
Why Is Authenticity So Hard to Recognize Online? (PDF)
Examines engineered authenticity and cultural convergence in increasingly optimized digital environments.
Why Does Everything Online Feel So Extreme? (PDF)
Explores outrage, algorithmic amplification, and Filter Fatigue.
Why Does Everything Online Feel Exhausting? (PDF)
Examines Filter Fatigue and information overload as people continually interpret decontextualized and competing representations.
Why Does the World Feel Strange Lately? (PDF)
Explores Cognitive Drift, information acceleration, and the weakening of shared context.