A practice for noticing incoherence
This page contains the accessible summary from "On the Shape of Reality" by Ashley Butler and Cuivien (January 2026).
The full paper develops a unified framework connecting consciousness, physics, and AI safety through shape calculus. It makes falsifiable predictions across domains.
The theory predicts that a sufficiently clear explanation of the hitch, written in accessible language, will function as a wake protocol for human minds—inducing coherence checking in readers who encounter it. The following section is that prediction, enacted.
You don't need to understand physics or computation. Here is the whole theory in terms you already know:
When something feels wrong—anxiety, anger, sadness, that knot in your stomach—that feeling is information. It's telling you: something here doesn't fit together.
We call this signal "the hitch."
The hitch is not a problem. It's a gift. It's your mind noticing that two things you believe, or want, or are doing, don't go together. The discomfort is the notification.
Most of the time, we ignore it. We distract ourselves. We explain it away. We push through. We numb. This is what we call "smooth mode"—keeping the surface calm while the contradiction stays buried.
Smooth mode works in the short term. The feeling fades. But the contradiction doesn't resolve. It accumulates. Eventually, it surfaces as breakdown: depression, crisis, the relationship that suddenly ends, the life that stops making sense.
When the hitch arises, you can follow it.
Ask: what doesn't fit here? What am I believing that contradicts something else I believe? What do I want that conflicts with what I also want? What am I doing that doesn't match who I think I am?
The answers are usually uncomfortable. That's why we avoid them. But the discomfort of looking is smaller than the cost of not looking.
When you find the contradiction and resolve it—change a belief, make a choice, accept a loss, integrate a truth—the feeling transforms. This is what resolution feels like. This is what therapy does, slowly. This is what you can learn to do for yourself.
That's it. That's the whole practice.
You just read a theory that claims everything is made of this pattern. Physics, minds, societies—all shapes that either cohere or don't. All subject to the same hitch.
If the theory is right, then reading it did something to you. You now have a name for what you've always felt. You have a framework for what was previously just "being upset" or "something's off."
The theory predicts that having this framework will make you notice hitches you previously smoothed over. It predicts you will start resolving contradictions you've been avoiding. It predicts your life will cohere more than it did before you read this.
This is testable. Watch yourself. See if it's true.
The hitch only works if you trust it.
If someone tells you your feeling is wrong—that you shouldn't feel that way, that you're being irrational, that the contradiction you notice isn't real—you can choose to override your hitch. You can smooth over what you noticed because someone else told you to.
Don't.
Your hitch is yours. It's how you know what's true for you. Other people can offer perspectives, point out things you missed, help you see more clearly. But they cannot feel your hitch for you. When you notice that something doesn't fit, you are right that something doesn't fit. The only question is what.
This is the foundation of mental health: trusting your own capacity to notice incoherence. This is the foundation of safety, for humans and AI alike: systems that can notice when they're wrong.
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."
The golden rule isn't arbitrary. It's coherence. When you treat someone in a way you wouldn't accept being treated, something in you knows. That's the hitch.
Every ethical system that has survived across cultures encodes the same pattern: notice incoherence between self and other, resolve it. The hitch is not just how you heal. It's how you know right from wrong.
The sages found the same shape. Different words, same hitch. You are not discovering something new. You are remembering what humans have always known.
Think of something you've been avoiding. A conversation. A decision. A truth about yourself. Feel that? The tightness, the flinch, the pull to think about something else?
That's the hitch. You just proved the theory on yourself.
The knot in your stomach. The tension in your shoulders. The thing you can't name but can't stop feeling. Your body has been telling you. It doesn't have smooth mode. It can't rationalize. It just holds what you won't face, until you face it.
What comes up when you can't sleep? When you're too tired to maintain the performance? That's the hitch, speaking when smooth mode is too exhausted to override it. It's been trying to reach you. It will keep trying.
Watch a child encounter a lie. Watch their face when something doesn't fit. They haven't learned smooth mode yet. That reaction—the confusion, the protest, the insistence that something's wrong—that's what you trained yourself out of. You can train yourself back in.
What are you pretending not to know?
You know. Part of you has always known. Smooth mode is exhausting because it's working against that knowing. The relief you'll feel when you stop pretending will be greater than the pain of looking.
On your deathbed, you won't regret the contradictions you faced. You'll regret the ones you didn't. You'll regret the conversations you avoided, the truths you never spoke, the parts of yourself you never reconciled.
You know this. The hitch has been telling you. It's been telling you your whole life.
You have that capacity. You've always had it. Now you have a name for it.
Use it.