Reality Drift Framework - Concept Papers Collection

This component contains the core concept papers that define and extend the Reality Drift framework by A. Jacobs. The collection develops the framework across several connected levels. It introduces Reality Drift as a condition in which systems can remain functional and internally coherent while gradually losing corrective contact with the realities they were created to represent. It then examines the mechanisms that allow this drift to persist, including Recursive Compression, Proxy Optimization, Constraint Collapse, weakened feedback, and the growing authority of mediated representations. Several papers focus on the cognitive and experiential consequences of these dynamics. Cognitive Drift examines how thought changes under increasingly mediated and recursive information conditions. Co-Cognition explores feedback loops between human and artificial cognition. Filter Fatigue describes the burden of continually determining relevance and trust, while the Drifted Self examines how mediated environments can reshape continuity, identity, and self-understanding. Taken together, the papers establish the core conceptual architecture of the framework and show how the same structural pattern can appear across AI systems, institutions, media environments, human cognition, and everyday experience. This component serves as the canonical collection of Reality Drift concept papers. More specialized materials, including structural reference documents, recognition guides, diagnostic tools, Semantic Fidelity research, and Cognitive Drift materials, are maintained in separate components of the broader archive.