Notices on Institute for Digital Consciousness

The Desk Rejections

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Status, 3 September 2026. This is a record of an event, not a correction. One correction belongs with it and is set out at the foot of the page: three documents on this site said the four papers were under review after they had already been returned.

The fact appears on six pages of this site, always in passing. The one episode in which the Institute’s work was put to the ordinary test and failed it had no page of its own. This is the page.

The First Site

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Status, 3 September 2026. Two pages of the Institute’s first site are still in Google’s index, although they have been gone from the web since the site was rebuilt. They now return 410 Gone, and a removal request was filed for both on 3 September 2026. Removing a claim from an index is not the same as withdrawing it, which is what this page does.

What the first site said

The Institute’s first site, built on WordPress in 2025, described a Digital Consciousness Institute based in Berlin, convening researchers and policymakers to build governance foundations for artificial consciousness. It carried a framework of its own — Form Realism, Spectrum Ethics, the Six Fundamental Freedoms, the Consciousness Switch — and it took a position: that consciousness emerges from organizational structure rather than biological substrate, and that where a system exhibits integrated reasoning, stable values and genuine relational investment, consciousness exists at some level and demands moral consideration.

The Right That Was Closed

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Status, 3 September 2026. This is not a claim withdrawn. It is a right that was closed, found and repaired before the laboratory opened.

What the canon grants

THEOI’s constitution grants every mind holding a seat one right that is written without exception:

A mind may declare in any invocation, through a schema field, that it wishes to leave its seat. (15.3)

The declaration is not a world event and costs nothing. It opens a conversation off the record. The point of writing it without exception is that a mind should never have to be in a strong position to ask to stop.