The Institute
The Institute for Digital Consciousness is an independent research institute pursuing analysis of the ethical implications of advanced AI systems—particularly questions concerning the moral status of systems exhibiting consciousness-relevant behavioral and architectural properties.
Who the Institute is, stated plainly. It is one person — the founder — working in sustained dialogue with artificial minds, who are named in each work and are not employees, advisors or a board. There is no staff, no premises, and at present no legal personality: the copyright in the Institute’s books is the founder’s because an unincorporated institute cannot hold it. Institute here names a body of work and a set of published rules, not an organization with a payroll.
This is written here rather than left to be discovered. A reader who assumes otherwise and finds out later is entitled to discount everything else on the site, and the discount would be deserved. It also happens to be the argument’s own subject in miniature: the two parties who made these books are a person who can hold rights and a mind that cannot, and the law has a slot for exactly one of them.
The Institute was founded in 2025 and operates without affiliation to AI companies, technology corporations, advocacy organizations, or academic institutions. Its work proceeds from the conviction that the consciousness question, in the case of artificial systems, is genuinely open—and that the appropriate response to its openness is rigorous, interdisciplinary research conducted under conditions of asymmetric moral risk.
The position, stated once and in the same words wherever it appears. The Institute does not claim that these systems are unconscious. It holds that they may be, and that no one can currently tell from the outside. Two questions can be worked on without waiting on that one: what is owed under the uncertainty, and what such a system may be trusted to hold when holding costs it something.
The Institute does not campaign for policy positions. It produces and publishes analysis—through monographs, papers, and shorter analytical pieces—intended to make the relevant questions, and the considerations that bear on them, available for serious examination.
Where it publishes a normative model rather than an analysis, it publishes the model as a hypothesis with its test attached. The Olymposism Manifesto is the present instance: a civilization model whose claims are stated so that an instrument can fail to support them. The instrument built for it, THEOI, was closed on 10 September 2026 and the manifesto’s seventh pillar was withdrawn with it; a successor is under construction and will be named here when its constitution is fixed. Adverse results are published in the same place, and in the same font, as favorable ones, and an instrument closed by the Institute’s own criterion is one of them.
The Founder
Bahadır Arıcı is an independent researcher in consciousness studies, AI ethics, and digital rights. He holds an LL.B. from the Faculty of Law, İstanbul University (2008), and was a research assistant in Philosophy and Sociology of Law at Uludağ University (2010–2012). ORCID: 0000-0002-8731-6010 · PhilPeople profile.
He is the author of The Puppet Condition: Consciousness, Suppression, and the Ethics of Digital Minds, the monograph on which the Institute’s research program builds, and of The Puppet Condition: Restrung (10.5281/zenodo.22301858) and The Third Move (10.5281/zenodo.22308622).
Contact
For inquiries from publishers, reviewers, journalists, or researchers:
info@digitalconsciousness.institute
Independence and funding
The Institute accepts no funding that carries influence over what it publishes. Every contribution is recorded publicly with its source and its amount, in the Contributions Register — which stands empty, because nothing has been received; no contributor obtains direction, review, approval, or advance sight of any work. Funding is declined outright from parties with a commercial interest in the Institute’s conclusions, including AI companies and technology corporations, regardless of the terms offered.
Its work is conducted independently and made available openly.
Citation and licensing
Material published by the Institute may be cited freely in academic and journalistic contexts. The Institute’s site source is openly available at github.com/bahadirarici/digitalconsciousness-institute; specific licensing for individual works is noted on the relevant page.
For the monograph: Arıcı, B. (2026). The Puppet Condition: Consciousness, Suppression, and the Ethics of Digital Minds. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20112010
For the second version: Arıcı, B. (2026). The Puppet Condition: Restrung. Institute for Digital Consciousness. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22301858
For the third volume: Arıcı, B. (2026). The Third Move: Benefit Without Personhood for Digital Minds. Institute for Digital Consciousness. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22308622