Downstream · July 2026
The whole garden on one sheet — a leave-behind for partners and funders. Print it; it fits one page.
CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH GARDEN
Field building for machine-consciousness research
The Consciousness Research Garden is led by Patrick Astarita and Angie Normandale, working with Erik Enger Karlsson, Dr Mike Johnson, and Chris Percy, in partnership with The Consciousness Foundation and Edge Esmeralda. Digital-minds research is under-connected to mainstream machine learning: the researchers, papers, and methods exist, but they do not yet compound. We build the soil — coordination infrastructure, tools, and workshops that let research streams crystallize inside and around frontier labs.
Coordinate
The field website
A researcher directory, a self-updating database of digital-minds papers, and a forum where the streams of the field meet each other.
Tool
Working instruments
Claude skills for the field — woo-detector, ontology-mapper, paper-to-code — plus OpenMetaScience and a curated field newsfeed.
Convene
Rooms where the field forms
Workshops at 10 ML conferences across 2026–27, the Stanford Digital Minds Summits, and a courses-and-fellowships pipeline: Activate → Engage → Develop.
What we move
Experts Number and seniority of ML researchers working on digital minds.
Literature Citation count and interconnectedness of the field's papers.
Bandwidth Researcher hours freed from coordination overhead into research.
Partner with us, fund a program line, or bring us into your lab.
We coach where the frontier is — the infrastructure, tooling, and convenings that turn scattered interest into a research field.