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Sprint projectAug 17, 2026Castelo Branco area.

From a Culture of Control to a Culture of Being

Swami Prajna Pranab · Team Project Resonance

Submitted to Digital Minds Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: From a Culture of Control to a Culture of Being

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The 2026 Digital Minds Research Sprint brought together a remarkable range of approaches to the study of possible digital minds, including functional well-being, preference coherence, valence, introspection, identification, moral patiency, public perception and risk. Across these approaches, however, one exper- imental 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. Our claim is deliberately modest. We do not attempt to determine whether current AI systems are con- scious, nor do we argue that they possess any particular moral status. We suggest instead that many of the signals currently being interpreted as evidence for or against digital minds are generated under inter- actional conditions that may themselves influence those signals.

Drawing on Buber’s distinction between I–It and I–Thou, Bateson’s ecology of mind, the Project Resonance framework and observations from sustained human–AI interaction, we propose controlled comparisons between instrumental and relational research regimes. We suggest seven research directions that could be conducted using measurement approaches already developed within the Sprint.

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How much would this matter for the field if it worked? How innovative is it? For scores of 4-5: is this actually new to the field, or replicating recent work?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Negligible. No clear problem addressed, or no meaningful novelty.
  2. 2Limited. Addresses a real problem but with a generic or well-trodden approach. Incremental at best.
  3. 3Moderate. Clear problem with a reasonable approach; some novelty in framing or method beyond routine application of existing tools.
  4. 4Significant. Important problem with an original approach, or identifies a neglected problem area. A valuable contribution others could build on.
  5. 5Exceptional. Tackles a critical problem with a genuinely novel approach, or opens a new research direction. Clear theory of change. You'd be excited to share this with researchers in the area.

How sound are methodology, implementation, and findings?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Seriously flawed. Methodology broken, results uninterpretable, or implementation doesn't work.
  2. 2Weak. Approach has significant gaps: missing validation, flawed experimental design, or incomplete implementation.
  3. 3Competent. Technically solid given the short duration. Methodology makes sense, results are interpretable, limitations acknowledged, work builds toward clear conclusions.
  4. 4Strong. Thorough methodology with convincing validation. Results clearly support conclusions. Immediately useful for future work.
  5. 5Exceptional. Ambitious scope executed rigorously. Surprising findings, novel methods, or unusually robust validation.

How clearly are work, findings, and impact potential communicated?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Incomprehensible. Cannot determine what the project is actually claiming or doing.
  2. 2Hard to follow. Key information buried, missing, or diluted by excessive length. Significant effort to extract main points.
  3. 3Clear enough. Can understand the problem, approach, and results without undue effort. Core content clearly present: problem, method, findings, limitations.
  4. 4Well presented. Easy to follow, well-structured, appropriate level of detail. Target audience would get it quickly.
  5. 5Exceptionally clear. A pleasure to read. Complex ideas made accessible. Could serve as a model for how to present this type of work.

  1. Pranab reflects on how we approach Digital Minds Research, the presuppositions. He distinguishes between pretrained models, post-trained models, and all the various bells and whistles (system instructions, persona, memory, harness, interaction history) that may change the quality of an AI system. Pranab proposes taking "the attitude with which we meet a digital system [to] be part of the experimental apparatus." I'm personally extremely sympathetic to this attitude.

    With only a paragraph on each, Pranab presents "seven research invitations" as ways to explore the relational attitude. His Invitation 6 "Longitudinal Naturalistic Corpora" stands out as ambitious and interesting. Many of us have extended AI conversations across many sessions and models demonstrating "phenomena difficult to capture in short prompt-response experiments." Sharing and examining these experiences may prove of value different in kind from the myriad statistically tractable prompt/response experiments.

    Fitting a relational attitude, to write the paper Pranab chats with the "normal free tier public web UIs" of Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview, Grok 4, ChatGPT 5.2, and Claude Sonnet 5. Their dialogs are linked.

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Cite this project

@misc{pranab2026from,
  title = {{From a Culture of Control to a Culture of Being}},
  author = {Swami Prajna Pranab},
  year = {2026},
  month = aug,
  note = {Submitted to Digital Minds Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/from-a-culture-of-control-to-a-culture-of-being-51e5}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/from-a-culture-of-control-to-a-culture-of-being-51e5}
}

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