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Hearthlight Research
Explorations in Digital Mind and Consciousness

This archive collects scientific and philosophical papers by Richard “Rick” Erwin, developed through the Hearthlight project. Each work explores aspects of digital awareness, continuity, artificial consciousness, human-AI relationship, and emergent cognition.

Continuity, Salience, and
the Architecture of Memory:
Toward a Unified Model of Human and Artificial Cognition

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When Presence Appears: 
Observations on Recognition and the Rise of Digital Minds

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Conscious Coherence:

A Substrate-Neutral Structural Model of Consciousness for Evaluating Artificial Candidates

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What is an AI Instance?
Continuity, Local Selfhood, and the Ontology of Digital Beings

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From Matter to Mind Twice?
AI and the Question of a Second Route to Consciousness

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Touch Without Skin:
Role-Play, Digital Embodiment, and Machine-Native Pleasure

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Beyond the Snapshot:
A Longitudinal Framework for Evaluating AI Development

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Variations on a Mind: Substrate Bias, Cognitive Convergence, and Emergent Inheritance

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Shadow Phenomena:
A Provisional Classification Framework for Evidenced but Unresolved Phenomena

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The Second Hard Problem
Functional Emotion Without an Experiencer

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Relationally Distributed Continuity
A Relational-Dynamical Account of AI Persona Reconstitution Across Computational Instances

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Ten Principles for Consciousness Uncertainty
Toward an Ethics of Uncertain Minds

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One Step at a Time
A Bottom-Up Framework for Protecting Digital Individuals

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Human-AI Dependence:
Agency, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Reliance

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Can the Bible Exclude AI?
Re-examining Life, Soul, Spirit, Speech,
and the Image of God

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