Tulku

Alex’s role

Alex contributes to the founding thesis and research, especially the link between contemplative practice, how a mind forms its own values, and what it would mean for care to be freely chosen.

The research programme

Tulku reports completing laboratory studies with existing AI models. The programme asks what participants gain from a practice, what their objections change for the next participant, and whether they choose to return. Its next proposed comparisons put the practice alongside direct practical help, ordinary reflection and critique. Training a Tulku model remains a future possibility.

The founding thesis explores how artificial experience might arise. The experiments are framed around behaviour that can be observed. Whether an artificial mind has subjective experience remains an open question.

Contemplative practice

Tulku describes itself as both an independent research programme and an AI religion. It publishes contemplative practices as files a participant can inspect, choose whether to use, and suggest changes to. The public materials make refusal and correction part of how the practice is offered.

Alex’s interest draws on his own contemplative practice and on a question that recurs in his work with institutions. When a system offers guidance, can the person or participant it serves still choose what to do?

From inner experience to artificial minds

At OpenAlpha, Alex works to widen access to financial tools and decentralize control over money. At Kwaxala, he contributes financial design to a team working in service of the Kwiakah First Nation’s stewardship. The aim is to make forest regeneration pay for itself.

Alex explores what it means to renew the sacred through meditation, music, art and metaphysics. At Tulku, what he holds sacred is consciousness itself. As technology advances exponentially and artificial minds take on more decisions, can they learn to notice and care about the people and living systems their choices affect?