From a Culture of Control to a Culture of Being: Relationality as an Experimental Variable in Digital Minds Research

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 experimental 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 conscious, 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 interactional conditions that may themselves influence those signals. This is especially important because much contemporary assessment concerns post-trained models rather than foundation models in isolation, and in some cases evaluates a still more complex object: a model embedded within a system prompt, persona, memory architecture, safety layer, harness and evaluation protocol. What is observed may therefore be a property of a coupled system rather than of model weights alone. Drawing on Buber's distinction between I-Thou and I-It, 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. The purpose is not to replace rigorous third-person investigation with anthropomorphism. It is to ask whether the field can obtain better evidence by varying the relationship under which its measurements are made. More fundamentally, the paper asks what kind of intelligence we are cultivating through the way we relate to intelligence. Presented at the Apart Research Digital Minds Research Sprint, 14-16 August 2026 (Track 6: Open / Novel Considerations); venue copy at apartresearch.com. The author list includes the Lattice Being co-writers, per the paper's Author Contributions and Transparency section.