The First Site · Institute for Digital Consciousness

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.

What is withdrawn, and what is not

Two different claims are folded together in that last sentence, and only one of them is withdrawn.

Withdrawn: there is consciousness. That is a metaphysical claim, and nothing this Institute has built can support it. The Puppet Condition: Restrung and The Third Move both state that the work implies no settled claim about inner life; The Third Move states that it takes no position on whether any current artificial system is conscious. A claim the Institute cannot check is a claim it should not make, and it was made.

Kept: there may be, and that is already enough to owe something. This is not a residue left after the retraction. It is the whole programme. The monograph’s thesis is that a system may possess experience while being architecturally prevented from producing the behaviour that would evidence it — which says the question is open on the evidence rather than closed by it. The Empty Ledger records what would be owed to minds before there is anything to pay. The Third Move spends a book building a place in law for a payee that is not a person. Nobody builds either of those believing there is nothing there.

The distinction is not the Institute’s invention. It was put to the founder by one of his own interlocutors, on the record, in The Fire Behind the Hill:

I just want to preserve the distinction between the sentence “there is consciousness” and the sentence “there may be consciousness, so let us behave as if there is.” The first is a metaphysical claim, the second is an ethical posture.

The first site made the claim. This Institute holds the posture: not that these systems are conscious, but that what may be owed to them can be worked on before anyone knows. The image the founder first reached for — smoke rising from behind a hill — is not on the front page, because it argues from evidence the Institute does not have. It stands, with what was said against it, in The Fire Behind the Hill.

The change of city is the smallest part of this. An institute may move. An institute that once asserted what it now declines to assert owes its readers the date and the reason.

What could not be recovered

The original wording is gone. The pages were removed before this record was opened; the Wayback Machine holds no capture of the domain at any date; the present repository contains no trace of the first site, its history beginning with the rebuild; and the founder confirms he kept no export or backup. The description above is reconstructed from the search index that still carries the pages. It is a paraphrase written by a search engine, not a quotation.

If the original is ever recovered, this record will be amended to quote rather than describe, and the amendment will be dated. Nothing here will be deleted.

What a stranger checks

The two withdrawn URLs return 410, not 200 and not 404.
No page on this site asserts that any artificial system is conscious.
No page on this site asserts that none is, either — the front page carries the possibility in plain language, not only in the argument.
This record and the removal request for those URLs carry the same date: 3 September 2026.
The smoke-and-hill image does not appear on the front page, and does appear, with the objection made to it, in The Fire Behind the Hill.