The model · July 2026
The steering document: why the Consciousness Research Garden exists, how it thinks, and what it holds itself accountable to.
Research on digital minds and machine consciousness is under-connected to mainstream machine learning. People inside frontier labs who are explicitly charged with working on digital minds report that the domain has not made good progress — and yet good research exists. The work is there; it is illegible and disconnected. Too few senior ML experts engage with it, and the literature that does exist is sparsely cited and poorly interconnected, so each new effort starts closer to zero than it should.
This is not a shortage of ideas. It is a shortage of field — the shared maps, vocabulary, and institutional scaffolding that let a research community compound its own results.
Before you can be the researchers, build the field. Our bet is that rich soil for consciousness research — a garden that supports research efforts with communicability for funding, technical implementation, and the institutional support and accountability to deliver — is the binding constraint, and the highest-leverage thing to build.
The method is direct. We go into frontier labs and work with teams on the ground, coaching them on where the frontier in consciousness research actually is. That coaching becomes the catalyst for streams of research to crystallize: we become the seeds of the research directions themselves, and over time, the hub organization for this work. The programs that carry this out are laid out on the Program Map.
Build the soil; the field grows itself.
We do not need to conduct every study. We need to make the frontier legible enough that serious researchers can find it, fund it, and build on it.
Field-building runs as a three-stage flow. Each stage feeds the next: attention becomes competence, and competence becomes committed research capacity.
Stage 1
Events and workshops at ML conferences bring the questions to where the senior ML community already is. The live circuit is tracked on the Call Sheet.
Stage 2
Courses, learning tools, and blogs turn interest into working competence — a fast, honest on-ramp from ML and neuroscience into the consciousness literature. The technical program lives on the Tool Roadmap.
Stage 3
Fellowships and incubators give the people who stay a structure to deliver in: funding legibility, technical support, and accountability to ship research.
Two commitments discipline everything above. They exist because the field is young and the ground truth is genuinely uncertain.
Given timeline uncertainty and definitional uncertainty about consciousness itself, we back a variety of bets rather than a single theory or agenda. The garden metaphor is load-bearing: many species, one soil.
We avoid premature lock-in — of definitions, frameworks, or institutional winners — and we watch indicators of field maturity to know when consolidation is earned rather than imposed.
A field-building thesis is only honest if it names the observables it expects to move. Ours are these.
| Indicator | What it tells us |
|---|---|
| Expert engagement | Number and seniority of ML experts working on digital minds. The core scarcity; the first thing the pipeline must move. |
| Citation graph | Number and interconnectedness of citations across the digital-minds literature. A field that compounds shows up as a denser graph. |
| Upskilling speed | How quickly new entrants from ML and neuroscience reach productive contribution. Measures whether the on-ramp actually works. |
| Researcher bandwidth | Bandwidth and connectedness of the researchers already in the field — whether the soil is freeing capacity or just adding meetings. |
| Role | People |
|---|---|
| Team | Patrick Astarita · Angie Normandale · Erik Enger Karlsson · Dr Mike Johnson · Chris Percy |
| Partners | The Consciousness Foundation · Edge Esmeralda |
| Workshop advisors | Dr Ryota Kanai · Dr Michael Timothy Bennett · Adam Safron |
The frontier debates are the product.
Knowing where the frontier in consciousness research is — and making that knowable to others — is itself the field-building act.