Cognitive Drift Series: Compression, Recursion, Semantic Fidelity, and Judgment in the Reality Drift Framework

This bundle contains the Cognitive Drift Series, a set of papers within the Reality Drift Framework that formalize the cognitive and mechanistic layer of drift. The series examines how human and artificial systems can remain coherent and functional while gradually losing alignment with underlying reality. Across five papers, the series develops a model of cognition based on compression, recursion, semantic fidelity, constraint, and judgment. It argues that Cognitive Drift emerges when compression increases, recursion accelerates, semantic fidelity degrades, and constraint or judgment weakens. Under these conditions, systems continue producing coherent outputs while losing grounding in reality. The bundle includes papers on the core Cognitive Drift model, the Drift Principle, loss of stop conditions, runaway recursion, and semantic fidelity as a structural condition for meaning. Together, these works describe why modern life can feel coherent but unstable, why AI can produce fluent but ungrounded outputs, why decisions feel delayed or non-final, and why meaning becomes harder to maintain under information overload. This upload includes PDF versions of the Cognitive Drift papers and a README overview for repository-style navigation.