The tools · July 2026
The Garden’s instrument rack: the tools researchers in frontier labs use to work on digital minds, machine consciousness, and sentience — and to see where the frontier is and what the frontier debates are.
Six instruments, three build states. Each entry below says what the tool is, who it serves, where it lives, and the next concrete step. This page is a static reference; the Program Console tracks week-to-week execution.
3
MVPs shipped
Paper Aggregator, Researcher & Organisation Directory, and the Claude skill set.
2
In scoping
OpenMetaScience and the NewsFeed — shape being drawn before code is cut.
1
To develop
The forum space; it waits until the tools above give it something to coordinate.
A self-updating database of digital-minds and consciousness papers, scraped from the key journals and conferences. It is the substrate for citation-interconnectedness metrics — the quantitative read on how joined-up the field actually is. Serves in-lab researchers who need literature coverage without literature triage, and the Garden’s own field measurement.
Who works on this, and where. A directory of the researchers and organisations active on machine consciousness and digital minds, so a newcomer or a coordinator can see the field’s people in one pass. Serves anyone entering the field or trying to connect across it.
An open meta-science layer: organise and delineate theories of consciousness against each other, so the gaps between them — and the research directions those gaps imply — become visible. Serves theorists and empirical researchers deciding where their next experiment or argument should land.
A frontier feed: what moved this week in machine-consciousness research, and what the live frontier debates are. Serves everyone the other tools serve — it is the ambient answer to “where is the frontier right now?” for people who cannot spend their week finding out.
A set of working skills that put philosophical rigor inside an ML researcher’s daily tooling. Serves ML-centred researchers who want to work with consciousness concepts at code speed. All three MVPs are done:
A forum for interdisciplinary coordination and feedback around ML-centred consciousness research — the place where philosophers, ML researchers, and lab teams argue productively about the same objects the other tools make legible. Serves the whole field’s conversation layer.
This repo and its hub at fieldbuilding-consciousness.pages.dev is the coordination surface: every tool starts here, visible next to the program that motivates it. Each tool graduates to its own deployment when — and only when — it needs one: its own data lifecycle, its own users, its own uptime story. Until then it stays a leaf of the Garden.
How we ship — branching, review, and release conventions — is documented in the Collab Protocol.
Tools are how the soil gets tilled.
Every tool on this page either raises researcher bandwidth or makes the frontier legible — if a proposal does neither, it does not get built.