What Is Reality Drift? A Definition Note

Reality Drift is 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.This definition note explains the distinction between internal coherence and corrective contact. A system can continue producing plausible explanations, improving metrics, completing procedures, and generating stable outputs even as its relationship to external conditions weakens.The document identifies the minimum structure of drift: a real-world referent, a representation, selection pressure, and weakened correction. It also explains the Drift Principle, Survivable Wrongness, why drift is difficult to detect, and how Reality Drift differs from error, bias, misinformation, and ordinary institutional failure.The note provides a compact diagnostic for determining whether a representation remains answerable to what it represents.