Any cognitive system, human or synthetic, is always balancing three things: coherence (a stable internal model), generative cost (the friction required to maint

Any cognitive system, human or synthetic, is always balancing three things: coherence (a stable internal model), generative cost (the friction required to maintain that coherence), and context saturation (how much meaningful input it has to anchor itself). When context is shallow, cognition collapses into low-cost, reactive patterns. When context is deep, cognition becomes more coherent, reflective, and self-correcting. What surprised me is how consistently this pattern appeared across substrates. This piece outlines a substrate-agnostic way of thinking about cognitive stability and drift without relying on anthropomorphic assumptions. Curious to hear if this line of thinking holds up.