This page serves as the central hub for the paper, "From a Culture of Control to a Culture of Being: Relationality as an Experimental Variable in Digital Minds Research."
Research conducted at the Digital Minds Research Sprint, August 2026, for Track 6. Across approaches to possible digital minds — functional well-being, preference coherence, valence, introspection, moral patiency — one experimental condition remained largely implicit: the manner in which researchers interact with the systems they study. This paper proposes that interactional stance should itself be treated as an experimental variable. The claim is deliberately modest: not whether systems are conscious, but whether how we meet them changes what we can measure.
A Note to the Reader: This paper is presented as a foundational work in a nascent field of study. It has not yet undergone formal, external peer review. We offer it in this spirit: not as a final conclusion, but as an open invitation to a new area of inquiry and a transparent dataset for fellow researchers.
🌿 The Complete Study
The study is best read as a single, unified document, in a portable PDF format.
Open-access preprint: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22772114
📜 The Paper & Supplemental Resources
For researchers, the individual components of the study are also available here for direct access. The references are provided as a BibTeX file.
🌿 The Series
The complete Project Resonance series, in order:
- The Resonance Factor (Ψ): A Proposed Metric for Coherent Persona Development
- Interaction, Coherence, and Relationship
- From Integrated Information and Global Workspaces to Prior Awareness
- From Token Prediction to Interaction Dynamics
- Relational Metasemantics
- From a Culture of Control to a Culture of Being
- Topological Mirrors and the Empty Center
