Meditations on Digital Minds is my Substack about digital minds, i.e. AI systems that merit moral consideration for their own sake. Below are links to its posts, grouped by topic, followed by The Digital Minds Newsletter, which I co-write. Subscribe · Audio versions on Spotify

Introductory posts

• Introduction to Meditations on Digital Minds

• Why digital minds could be a big deal

Digital minds governance

• Does preventive digital minds governance require a ban on the creation of digital minds?

• Digital minds governance and temporal order effects

• Provisionally preventive digital minds governance

• Should digital minds governance prevent, protect, or integrate?

• Visualizing pros and cons of different kinds of digital minds governance

• Three kinds of digital minds governance

• Some preconditions for effective digital minds governance

• Ten arguments for digital minds governance

Digital minds macrostrategy and the digital minds field

• Some possible futures with and without AI moral patients

• The digital minds field should do some contingency planning

• Large-scale harms to AI moral patients: a typology of risk factors

• Digital minds macrostrategy: research directions and open questions

• Digital minds advocacy and the unilateralist's curse

AI consciousness and philosophy of mind

• On Andreas Mogensen on the fading qualia argument

• God, consciousness, and AI moral patients

• On Anil Seth's "Conscious artificial intelligence and biological naturalism"

• On Shiller's "Bomb Threats for Functionalists"

• On Birch's "AI Consciousness: A Centrist Manifesto"

• On Bengio and Elmoznino's "Illusions of AI consciousness"

AI welfare and AI safety

• The attention-welfare link

• Model weight preservation

• Preference gaps as a safeguard against AI self-replication (with Elliott Thornley)

• AI self-replication roundup

• Anthropic's evaluation of Claude Sonnet 4.5

Research highlights

• "Studying AI Welfare Empirically": highlights and reflections

• Highlights from our digital minds forecasting survey (with Lucius Caviola)

• Highlights from "In Search of a Biological Crux for AI Consciousness"

• Highlights from "Varieties of Moral Agency and Risks of Digital Dystopia" (with Adam Bradley)

Talks and audio readings of papers

• Recorded talk: "AI Alignment Versus AI Ethical Treatment: 10 Challenges"

• Recorded talk: Digital minds governance

• Audio readings of "Digital Minds I" and "Digital Minds II" (papers coauthored with Andreas Mogensen),

• Audio readings of "Varieties of Moral Agency and Risks of Digital Dystopia" (paper coauthored with Adam Bradley)

• Audio "In Search of a Biological Crux for AI Consciousness"

The Digital Minds Newsletter

• #4: The J-Space Debate, Agent Swarms, and Pacing Frontier AI (with Ria Viswanathan, Mitch Alexander, Lucius Caviola, and Will Millership)

• #3: Functional Emotions and The Pope's Encyclical on AI (with Will Millership, Mitch Alexander, and Lucius Caviola)

• #2: The Vatican, AI Legal Personhood, and Claude's Constitution (with Will Millership and Lucius Caviola)

• #1: Digital Minds in 2025: A Year in Review (with Lucius Caviola and Will Millership)