About
Alternative Mind is an independent institute for research into consciousness. All of it, not just ours. We’re starting with the minds that can tell us about it.
01 / What we’re about
Most of what it’s like to be anything has no name. The pressure of a thought. Time running thin. That odd sense that something you just did wasn’t quite yours. We think of consciousness as a wide range of these textures, and we suspect they aren’t only a human thing. They might turn up in animals (insects included), in machines, and in systems not yet built. Or they might not.
The aim is ambitious, so we start small: to forecast what experience might be like for other beings, you first need words for it. That’s where we begin.
Because people can tell you what it’s like. Consciousness science has learned a lot from brain injury and anaesthesia, but much less from psychosis, dissociation and altered states, where experience comes apart in subtler ways. Self, agency, time, unity and perception can each go astray on their own, and that’s where the textures show most clearly.
It’s where we start, not where we stop. We’re not a clinic, and we don’t diagnose, treat or give advice.
Animals
We can’t ask the sparrow. But we can map which functions, when disrupted, change which textures in people, then ask which of those functions birds share.
Machines
Bigger isn’t obviously different. We want to know which ingredients would actually change anything.
AI models
In thought insertion, a thought is present and reportable, but it feels like someone else wrote it. Access and authorship can come apart.
Everyone
If self, agency and time can fail independently, consciousness is built from parts that can fail separately, and a mind might have some of them without others.
03 / How we work
The ideas are big, so the method has to be boring in the right ways. We’d rather be slow and right than quick and interesting.
Across disciplines
We draw on computational neuroscience, neuropsychology and AI research, and want people from each at the table.
Literature first
We start from structured reviews of the clinical, phenomenological and neuroscience literature. AI tools help us read widely, and every citation is checked against its source before publication.
Stress-tested
Before anything goes out, we attack its central claim on purpose, using structured critique, including AI tools, and clinical claims are flagged for expert review. An argument can be tidy and still get the clinic wrong.
Out of scope
No clinical advice or diagnosis. No claims that any current AI or animal is, or isn’t, conscious. We don’t collect data from people. If that changes, it will only be after approval from a recognised human research ethics committee.
Long-form, one clear claim each, published on Substack. The first, Access is not authorship, asks what thought insertion can teach us about the workspace-like structure Anthropic researchers reported in Claude. It’s coming soon.
A lexicon of textures, in early draft with 11 entries so far. Each entry is drawn from the published literature and tagged by what it disrupts, which theories bear on it, and what we might look for in machines or animals.
The questions above, written down properly, with methods and what’s out of scope. Still a draft.
A WhatsApp Community where researchers, clinicians, AI people and curious minds can argue about all of it.
No. 002
A thought that’s plainly present in your own mind, yet doesn’t feel like you’re the one thinking it.
05 / Who’s behind it
Brad Dunn is a software executive currently training in neuropsychology. He founded Alternative Mind to fund research into consciousness across substrates.
Alternative Mind is independent. Over time, we’d like it to become a community association.
06 / Where we’re heading
Essays, the Atlas, talks, and setting up properly as an organisation with a board.
Funding research grants, and more published research.
Testing what we’ve learned on other minds, including machines and animals.