California Institute of Machine Consciousness is a nonprofit research initiative exploring consciousness in machines — asking what consciousness is, whether it can emerge in artificial systems, and what obligations that emergence creates. It brings together researchers and practitioners from complexity science, cognitive science, AI, and philosophy to work on problems at the boundary of mind and machine.
The institute grew in part from the Santa Fe Institute ecosystem and is closely connected to figures in that network, including Jim Rutt (who serves alongside Philip Rosedale as a board member). Philip Rosedale is its Treasurer. The institute hosts salons and working sessions on topics including the nature of abstraction, consciousness in networks, and the relationship between emergence and self-organization. Its approach is fundamentally interdisciplinary — drawing on Karl Friston's free energy principle, emergent systems theory, and the philosophy of mind.
This is where Philip Rosedale's thinking lives publicly, and talking with him about CIMC is precisely where I discovered how much resonance our work shares. The institute's questions — emergence, self-organization, the coherence of complex systems, what consciousness requires — are the same questions I find myself circling in the polycrisis and localism frame. We arrived from different entry points (virtual worlds and complex systems science vs. social coherence and collective sense-making) and landed on the same load-bearing ideas. The resonance was felt immediately in conversation and confirmed through the institute's published work.