On the Origin of This Work

I came to information-theoretic approaches not through the literature but through a prior philosophical commitment. I was looking for a formal anchor, some mathematical expression of what it means for a system to orient toward reality rather than merely toward internal coherence. In application, I am using proxies because I still haven’t found that formal expression. The commitment to truth preceded the formalism.

The foundational claim is this: causal structure is ontologically prior to spacetime and time. Systems that persist — biological, cognitive, or artificial — do so by building compressed models of their environment. Compression is what makes a model useful because it strips noise and retains causal structure. The generative direction is decompression: using the model to predict, act, or explain. The pressure toward better compression is the pressure toward better causal models, which is the pressure toward truth. All successful systems are being pushed toward correspondence with reality. A system insulated from that pressure may be steered toward internal coherence, but that is no guarantee of aligning with reality.

I arrived here through an eclectic combination: developmental and evolutionary biology, neuroscience, formal epistemology, regulatory science, and early work in computer security. Running alongside was always a desire to square it all with physics, to be sure none contradict at the foundation. No single field contains the argument. The biological grounding matters: living systems that fail to track causal structure don't survive.

Both my collaborative work and VeracIQ are applications of how I see the world. The drift detection mechanisms in VeracIQ derive directly from my foundational theory.