Questions and Answers about the Hyperworld

Overpopulation: real problems and solutions

Throughout human history, approximately one hundred billion people have lived on our planet. This number helps us understand the scale: the nations, tribes, and cities of the past were quite small compared to today. And yet, even today, with a population of eight billion, the Earth is far from physical overcrowding.

Contrary to popular belief, the problem of overpopulation is not about a lack of land. There are vast, sparsely populated territories and coastlines with climates far more hospitable than, say, the United Arab Emirates—a country thriving in the desert. In China, the population density is actually two and a half times lower than in England.

Abundance and hunger

By some estimates, global agriculture, even at today’s level of technological development, could potentially provide full nutrition for up to 40 billion people. At the same time, according to available estimates from the UN and the WHO (source), today on Earth, from hunger and related diseases, far from the hysterics of propagandists, between 12 and 20 thousand people die every day, and about half of that number are children under 5. The depth of the platform is far greater than it might seem to those who dwell on the upper levels.

In a world where far more money is spent feeding pets than saving people dying of starvation, its values and current priorities are obvious. Most of the children we fail to protect do not die as a result of military action, but because of the very logic of the global capitalist system, which disposes of the surplus population the economy has no use for, far from the television cameras. Today it is their turn to be eaten; later that same inhuman logic will come for everyone else.

The true nature of the problem

Many modern problems have a managerial character rather than a technological one. They are indeed complex: it is not enough to simply send a hundred Boeings or tankers full of barley to Africa to stop people from dying of hunger. The problem is much deeper and more systemic.

Developed countries, as before, plunder the periphery, while the most developed one successfully engages in unequal exchange with other developed ones. All of this remains, for now, the foundation, the basic principle of the modern world order, and it also relates to the current overpopulation problems.

Multifaceted impact on the environment

Pollution, the depletion of natural resources, the energy crisis, overcrowding, and poverty—this is what people actually mean when discussing overpopulation problems, not a lack of physical space as such.

The planet's technological carrying capacity

The number of people planet Earth can support at an adequate standard of living without causing critical harm to the environment directly depends on humanity's level of technological development.

History demonstrates this dependency clearly. New technologies—from simple improvements in land reclamation and agronomy to modern advances in genetic modification—continue to increase food production. Each technological breakthrough expands the planet's carrying capacity.

The environmental problems we observe today are largely the result of using transitional, imperfect technologies. The outdated industries of the past polluted the environment orders of magnitude more than modern closed-loop production facilities.

The nanotechnology revolution

When humanity masters molecular nanotechnology in its mature form, a qualitative leap will occur in solving all resource problems. This technology will enable:

• Producing virtually any goods cleanly, efficiently, and at minimal cost approaching zero;
• Eliminating the accumulated environmental damage caused by the primitive production methods of previous eras;
• Recycling waste at the atomic level, converting it into useful resources;
• Creating closed-loop production cycles where the very concept of ‘waste’ disappears entirely.

This is precisely the direction humanity should focus its primary scientific efforts on. It is one of the most promising and, at the same time, achievable technological breakthroughs in the foreseeable future— a low-hanging fruit on the tree of progress.

The space perspective

Nanotechnology will also make economically accessible the colonization of space. And it is important to understand the true scale of resources available to humanity.

By cosmic standards, Earth is an insignificant, tiny speck in an ocean of matter and energy. Every second, space naturally wastes an amount of resources billions of times greater than everything the human species has used throughout its entire history.

One would need an extremely limited imagination to fail to conceive of a more constructive use of all this substance and energy.

The short answer to where to take them: to the Hyperworld—not into one common “future,” but into many separate, specially constructed worlds, each with its own epoch and its own order. Where to house them—first on Earth and in the Solar System, and later beyond it. This is precisely why space expansion stands on the list of practical goals on the website's main page, before the resurrection of ancestors: first space, then those who will inhabit it. Earth is the cradle, and the question of “will there be enough space” ceases to be a question the moment we venture beyond its boundaries.

The right to choose

If, say, after thousands of years of life, a person wants to end their journey, what is so bad about that?

Real evil is when a person's life is cut short against their will: by sudden catastrophe, incurable illness, violence, or old age. These are the causes of death that the philosophy of cosmism opposes.

Uncharted horizons of being

It is entirely possible that, in the end, no one will ever want to die, since both life itself and everything it can encompass will surely be enhanced by hitherto unknown, inconceivable possibilities that qualitatively improve what we today call living and existing.

Smartphones, television, YouTube, and video games—all of this would seem astonishing and unimaginable to someone living just a century ago. Surely, the Hyperworld of the future will bring just as many new and unthinkable wonders.

Most likely, people will be able to live out entire calendar, “scripted” lives — as a participant in one era or another, with full immersion in the fabric of events. It may even be possible to realize a kind of reincarnation, but with the personality retaining its memory of the past.

The biochemistry of states

Here it is important to address a fundamental point often overlooked in discussions about immortality. Weariness with life, apathy, loss of interest in existence —all of this, ultimately, is a matter of biochemistry, not an inevitable consequence of accumulated knowledge and experience.

Modern antidepressants and psychotherapy are intervention technologies of what could be called the Stone Age compared to how it may potentially be possible to regulate a person's internal homeostasis.

We are approaching the threshold of an era when our mental and physical inner balance can be regulated and fine-tuned optimally.

This does not mean forced happiness or “chemical paradise”. Rather, it is about the ability to maintain a naturally optimal state of mind for a fulfilling life— clarity of perception, emotional depth, creative energy, and the capacity for wonder and joy.

The nature of pioneers

A radical increase in lifespan is stepping into uncharted territory, where we will inevitably encounter unpredictable and perhaps even dangerous effects.

Throughout history, some people have always strived to overcome boundaries, explore or conquer new lands. They crossed vast oceans, ventured into space, climbed Mount Everest, explored the depths of the Mariana Trench, and achieved incredible athletic feats. All of this—different forms of transcendence and transcending the limits of the possible.

Extending life beyond its traditional span is equally a natural expression of human nature and our inherent drive to transcend boundaries. It will inevitably happen, one way or another—it is, if you will, our species' destiny.

Stages of the great transition

A project limited to the living can be privatized. The dead cannot be privatized. There are about a hundred billion of them, they have no money, no representatives, and no way to demand what is theirs—and therefore any program that seriously includes them ceases to be a service for the paying and becomes an obligation. A service can be sold. A debt can only be repaid or not repaid.

And selectivity here is not just inelegant—it is technically nonsensical. Kinship binds everyone to everyone else across a span of several generations: “bringing back only one’s own relatives” or celebrities would only create an avalanche, because they too would want to bring back someone—friends, loved ones, relatives—and after a dozen generations, everyone has the same ancestors and they are shared. You can separate some from others only by drawing an arbitrary line at someone's discretion—and any such line destroys the sole foundation on which the whole undertaking rests: that everyone has a debt to the dead.

This is not a guarantee, and there is nothing to promise here. But out of all known visions of the future, this is the only one where universality is embedded in the very formulation of the task, rather than promised in addition to it. In the others, it has to be added separately—and that is precisely why it is the first thing to fall away in them.

Universal technological resurrection, as envisioned by the philosophy of Russian cosmism, is not meant to be a one-time event, but a gradual, carefully managed process. The pace of extractions from the past can and must be regulated, carrying them out as the host civilization becomes ready.

This is a fundamentally important point: we are not talking about chaotically flooding the future with billions of the resurrected, but about phased integration, where every step is carefully calculated to account for potential problems and risks.

Technological prerequisites for abundance

Today, we can already see the paths that will lead humanity to an economy of abundance, where the cost of producing any goods, food, and even buildings will become practically zero. Likely, a friendly artificial mind or nanotechnologies will suffice, or a convergence of AI with robotics. Of course, something else might also emerge.

Nanotechnology: how it works and its potential

Nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter at the atomic level, the creation of interconnected networks of nanorobots — that is, nanofactories. Recognizing the prospects of this field, our country’s leadership led to the creation of JSC Rosnano, headed by Anatoly Chubais. They wanted the best, but it turned out as usual.

Perhaps the most basic thing that could potentially be made using nanotechnology is a 10×10 cm diamond. According to Eric Drexler, the estimated creation time is about an hour. The raw material is carbon. A cartridge for this task could even be filled with ordinary pencil lead: graphite and diamond consist of the same substance, differing only in crystal lattice structure.

Nanotechnology operates at the atomic level, and it is these structures that nanobots will be able to disassemble and reassemble.

Giving humanity plenty of cheap diamonds brings no significant benefit. The task is to print, in the same way, say, a hamburger, and perfectly accurately, with all the intracellular organelles of meat damaged by heat treatment—much more difficult, tens or hundreds of times harder than making a diamond. Theorists have found no physical reasons why this would be technically unfeasible.

Revolution in production

By developing nanotechnology to a level that allows creating bread or meat, humanity will gain the ability to produce practically anything— from a perfect copy of a Swiss watch to an entire automobile. For mature nanotechnology, there is no fundamental difference in what to create, provided the structure of the object is described in detail. The description given above, of course, is simplified, but the essence of nanotech lies precisely in these capabilities.

Imagine a future where you download a template file from the internet and on a home nanoprinter the size of a large microwave you reproduce a dish created decades ago by the finest Italian chef. The raw materials for such devices are a set of chemical elements from the periodic table.

Nanorobots, like ants in a colony, will be able to not only create, but also dismantle. A garbage dump accumulated over decades can be taken apart into its constituent elements and turned into raw material blocks for nanoprinters. These same robots are potentially capable of constructing buildings with properties unattainable with modern materials. In the distant future, this technology will make it possible to terraform and develop entire planets.

The inflation of a term

Unfortunately, in the media space the word “nanotechnologies” has undergone semantic inflation. The prefix “nano-” began to be added to almost anything—“nanowashes,” “nanotractors,” and other marketing chimeras appeared.

In reality, practical achievements are still limited to nanofilms or carbon nanotubes, applied to improve the properties of certain materials and other minor improvements.

Amid this information noise, the public’s understanding of the truly revolutionary prospects of molecular nanotechnology has become obscured and nearly lost.

Achieving civilizational breakthroughs on the scale of spaceflight or controlling nuclear fission in a reactor is not a job for startups. Tasks of this magnitude are economically unviable and therefore hold no interest for venture capital; realizing them requires a will of an entirely different order.

Artificial intelligence and robotics

Another technology capable of radically changing our world and social order — is artificial intelligence in synergy with robotics.

The best modern humanoid robots in their ability to manipulate physical objects are already approaching human level. Their main limitation is insufficiently developed cognitive abilities, “brains”. But this is a matter of time: when accumulated improvements reach a new quality—a phase transition will occur, and truly intelligent robots will be able to replace humans in practically all areas of physical and intellectual labor.

An important distinction: AI vs AM

Here it is critically important to draw a distinction between two concepts:

• Strong Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a highly efficient tool, an assistant capable of solving complex tasks, but lacking self-awareness and true autonomy. It is a perfect servant without its own desires, self-awareness, or fear.
• An artificial mind (AM) is something qualitatively different: a fully-fledged personality on a non-biological substrate, possessing self-awareness and free will.

One can anticipate potential issues with motivation, which in humans is predetermined by evolution and the characteristics of their biological architecture. However, this question lies beyond the scope of our current discussion.

In any case, Artificial minds raise fundamental ethical questions and the necessity of legally establishing the rights of such beings, as well as banning their exploitation.

The creation of a true artificial mind, unlike strong artificial intelligence, still appears to be very far away—despite speculation from the creators of modern neural networks, who often call something a “mind” when it fundamentally is not one.

The social consequences of automation

The prospects of total automation cause well-founded concern in many: what will happen when people are no longer needed by employers?

However, when a human is replaced by a robot, the amount of material wealth does not decrease— it increases, because a robot works more efficiently and around the clock. Even a fraction of a robot's productivity is enough to provide a steady income to a laid-off employee. Thus, the issue lies not in production itself, but in the fair (or unfair) redistribution of created wealth.

Today's concerns about how much an “extraction” will cost, or how many years one will have to work to pay it back, will almost certainly become archaic.

Wasted wealth

Humanity is already potentially very wealthy, but spends most of its available resources unproductively or outright wastefully. To understand the scale of the problem, let us consider a few examples.

Gold

Why does humanity continue to mine gold? For any individual company, the answer is obvious—profit. Gold is a measure of value, a safe-haven asset, a liquid state reserve.

But from the perspective of humanity as a whole, we have already mined enough gold for all practical needs for centuries to come. To continue mining means burning resources to increase stockpiles of metal that sits uselessly in vaults.

Global gold mining creates an illusory value of about three thousand tons of metal per year. With those same resources—human labor, energy, and machinery—we could keep wages for all participants in the process and additionally build hospitals, develop science and education, produce food, and send it as humanitarian aid.

The concept of the common pot

If we imagine humanity as a single system with a common pot of resources and wealth, then each of us through our activities either adds real value to this pot or withdraws from it, creating only an illusion of usefulness, and sometimes even deliberately destroying what others have created—for instance, in competitive struggle.

One can earn a living by creating wealth —producing food, building houses, healing people, and teaching children. Or, one can earn a living by creating hardship for others.

If you stop to think and are honest with yourself, you can understand exactly what, to a greater extent, you create through your activity — wealth or disaster, and what the organization you are part of creates. In most cases the answer is obvious: you either contribute, or parasitize, or destroy the benefits created by others.

The price of confrontation

Upholding narrow national interests at the expense of universal human interests creates colossal waste of resources. Military-industrial complexes, armies, navies, military bases—all of this consumes enormous resources without creating any real wealth.

During armed conflicts, accumulated wealth is directly destroyed, to say nothing of the human tragedies.

This is, of course, not a call for naive pacifism, but an attempt to draw attention to the price humanity pays for the inability to reach agreement. The lack of rational optimization and low efficiency at various systemic levels are largely caused by conflicts between private and public interests, as well as our division into clans of these interests.

This inefficiency manifests itself everywhere — in both large and small matters, and the total loss of wealth is measured not in percentages, but in multiples.

For humanity to achieve immortality and resurrection, it must first achieve forms of unity. Without a great, unifying idea for all mankind, humans remain competitors, or even enemies, to one another. This is one of the key reasons why the philosophy of Russian cosmism is so significant.

Science without results

Today's academic environment is often more concerned with publication counts, citation indices, and securing grants than with real breakthroughs. The incentive system for scientists is structured to reward the illusion of activity, rather than actual results. In this system, a researcher who publishes a hundred mediocre papers is deemed more successful than one who spends years working on a single groundbreaking discovery.

Innovation without innovation

The startup model, while effective for certain tasks, is mechanically applied everywhere, even where it does not apply. Innovation budgets are spent by people who do not even understand the difference between innovation and modernization. This creates the illusion of intense activity in the complete absence of meaningful and desperately needed progress.

The substitution of goals

Through aggressive marketing, multinational corporations no longer simply sell products—they shape life values, create artificial needs, centering everything solely on their own profit.

People are encouraged to fill the existential void left by the loss of genuine meaning with consumption.

A monstrous inversion has occurred: people have become nothing more than a resource for capital. But it is capital that should serve as a tool for unlocking human potential, and not the other way around.

The path to genuine abundance

Transitioning to an economy of abundance is not just a technological challenge. It requires changes in social relations, overcoming the contradictions between private and public interests.

Technologies—nanorobots, artificial intelligence, controlled thermonuclear fusion, and others— will provide the tools. But using these tools to create genuine abundance, rather than new forms of inequality and exploitation, will require humanity's conscious choice in favour of cooperation over competition, and the common good over private gain.

In the context of the project of universal resurrection this means that it is necessary not only to create the technological foundation of abundance, but also to resolve fundamental social contradictions.

Otherwise, abundance will coexist with artificially maintained scarcity, where the sum of our technologies will serve to deepen inequality, rather than liberate humanity.

The science of happiness: from philosophical questions to technological solutions

What is happiness? Is everyone capable of experiencing it? How does happiness differ from joy? If joy is merely a temporary state of mind, is it possible to prolong it by orders of magnitude? And if all the necessary conditions for happiness seem to be in place, yet happiness itself is missing, what is the reason?

Even defining the very concept of “happiness” is a subject for a major philosophical discussion. Ask different people how to achieve happiness, and you will get vastly different answers. The suggested recipes will be so highly individual that you will not find a universal formula.

Many do not even fully realize that success and happiness are two completely different peaks, often lying in opposite directions.

Where happiness comes from, where boredom comes from—people do not know, and science remains silent.

The basics of happiness studies are not taught in schools. Surprisingly, such a vital aspect of human existence remains outside the scope of systematic education. “The Institute of Happiness on Tverskaya Street” sounds more like a joke than the name of a serious scientific institution. Virtually no one is working on applied happiness studies in a methodical, scientific way.

Perhaps the time for this has not yet come, as other priorities seem more urgent. There are psychoanalysts, life coaches, and personal growth gurus, but on the whole, in this most crucial of matters, people are left to their own devices—searching, striving, and making the same mistakes over and over, generation after generation.

Spiritual practices, personal growth seminars, Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and traps like the goal of making a million dollars are all sometimes clumsy attempts to fill the vacuum of systematic knowledge about happiness. Without any scientific foundation, these approaches remain fragmented and contradictory.

State priorities and human happiness

The truth is that governments simply do not have time for individual happiness. Their care for citizens is expressed through social benefits, accessible healthcare, urban improvement, and the development of infrastructure and education. All of this is, of course, important and necessary, but it is only the foundation.

To this day, governments prioritize creating new weapons or launching satellites, outpacing a potential adversary, over ensuring the happiness of the actual people participating in this race. It might seem that this is just the way things should be, simply because no one has ever seen it any other way.

I would hope that the lives of all people, their happiness and its qualitative characteristics, would become the primary global priority. Today, the preconditions for this are limited, and it would be dishonest to confidently declare that this is exactly how things will turn out.

“Today, the main word that Russia should promote is the word ‘happiness’. We are a country of human happiness”,— Declared Artemy Lebedev, a man who has visited every country in the world.

Let the US continue to claim that it has freedom and democracy. Russia should declare that its priority is the wellbeing of its citizens. That could be an excellent competitive ideology.

«Artemy Lebedev is echoed by Alexey Arestovych, who revives the Aristotelian term “eudaimonia,” thereby marking a path out of the modern inferno in his analysis of Soviet science-fiction writer Ivan Yefremov’s novel “The Hour of the Bull.” An audio excerpt of this analysis is presented below. By posing the question of happiness, grief, and joy in this way, we radically change civilization itself and the direction of social development, which could ultimately transform the planetary order and steer it toward a more positive course».

Aleksey Nikolayevich Arestovich has been included by Rosfinmonitoring in the list of terrorists and extremists. He is wanted.

Some today might smirk skeptically: “What Russian happiness are you talking about?” Go to the regions, to the heartland, and see how people there survive on meager wages and pensions.

Prosperity is, of course, necessary—this is an important, though insufficient condition for happiness itself. Happiness is hidden not so much in money and consumption itself, although, when there is no money at all, this assertion is hard to agree with. What then does it consist of? How does this magic appear in people's hearts? What should we nourish and feed it with?

Judging by the cultural code, by the archetype of a special understanding of justice, where truth is more important than profit, —where else, if not in Russia, should one speak of this and try to build it? After a new variant of self-assembly, of course.

For now, what we see is more a general ideological vacuum, not viable attempts in some regions to spell, from the letters ‘a’, ‘r’, ‘s’, ‘e’, the word “happiness”.

A warning from the laboratory: the Universe 25 experiment

In the context of reflections on happiness, a highly instructive experiment is “Universe 25”. It was the twenty-fifth attempt by ethologist John Calhoun to build a mouse utopia, and every previous attempt had ended in the same tragic way.

Despite an abundance of food and water, the absence of external threats and disease, a comfortable temperature, and ample space, the mouse colony invariably degenerated and died out.

After the initial growth phase came a period that Calhoun called the “behavioral sink” — the breakdown of social bonds, aggression, apathy, and refusal to reproduce. In the end, the entire population died out, despite complete material abundance.

Humans, of course, are not rodents, but certain trends in modern civilization draw troubling analogies. Depression is becoming an epidemic in the wealthiest nations, birth rates are falling precisely where material conditions are best, and social atomization is rising, clearly correlating with growing prosperity.

The transhumanist approach: engineering happiness

Transhumanists believe that radical interventions are both permissible and desirable to redesign the human body, including the systems responsible for emotional states.

In the future, when science achieves a deep and precise understanding of the brain's biochemical processes, it will become possible to intervene effectively in the internal reward system gifted to us by evolution.

By influencing the neural, immune, and endocrine systems, humans will be able to literally control their mood and state of mind, tailoring it to current tasks—whether creative work requiring inspiration or complex cognitive processes.

In the process, a healthy, sustainable balance will probably be found — “the keys to happiness”, rather than merely a way to feel permanently high from any activity. Naturally, this is not about chronic narcotic intoxication, but about continuously maintaining a natural, optimal psychophysical state necessary for a full, productive, and joyful life.

Biotechnologies of youth

In the future biotechnology and cognitive technologies will be used to maintain physical and emotional youth. This includes not only healthy hormonal homeostasis, but also the optimization of all other vital functions.

Imagine a state where you always have energy, clarity of thought, and emotional openness—where you have both the desire and the ability. This will become an integral element of the very Man-Made Paradise, about which the philosophy of cosmism speaks.

The illusion of happiness in the age of consumption

Today happiness often turns out to be merely a lure — an animation on a screen, dangling from a bracket nailed to your head. It is impossible to get close to this screen: wherever you go, it will move along with you.

People are constantly surrounded by images of happiness. The ritual of consumption teaches us to feign delight over what is essentially an imposed, empty bustle.

All mass art concludes with a happy ending, deceptively extending happiness into eternity. All other scenarios seem to be forbidden.

Even a fool can see that aging and death lie just around the corner. But they are never allowed to stop and think, because images of joy and success bombard them from every side.

The biological tragedy

Of course, there are temporarily happy people. But few in our world can be happier than their own bodies. And the human body is inherently unhappy—it is busy slowly dying.

We strive for happiness in bodies biologically programmed for decay and death. Aging is not just the accumulation of years; it is the gradual decline of all functions, including the capacity to experience joy, enthusiasm, and love.

In the context of the Russian cosmism project, this means that resurrected generations must return not just to life, but to a life filled with genuine happiness — not illusory and fleeting, as is often the case now, but deep and enduring, based on overcoming the very biological causes of unhappiness and suffering.

Human satisfaction is not absolute, but relative.

The people we let into our circle are our rivals, closely watching our every success and failure. We compete with them, even if we think we do not, and they try to surpass us. We constantly compare our fortunes and achievements. Friends are supposed to witness our success, but they do not really want fortune to smile on us more than it does on them. We envy our friends, and they envy us, because these are the milestones by which we measure our own growth.

We can understand and accept, even with cold contempt, that we are all running a rat race against each other. But we do not want to leave this race. We want to win it, and in doing so, we fail to see that we could have chosen something completely different.

It is easy enough to endure someone else's misfortune, but accepting their success is incredibly difficult. Sometimes people consciously or unconsciously distance themselves to avoid feeling envious or angry—at themselves for their lack of happiness, and at the other person, who seems to have more blessings, and therefore more happiness.

Recommended reading on this topic

As another reference, one could recommend the lecture by Andrei Kurpatov “How to Become Happy?”, prepared for the III Forum of Social Innovations of the Russian Federation. Watch on YouTube

Diversity and transformation: on the value of every individual in the resurrection project

The danger of selection

Under which country’s laws should the resurrected be judged? By the norms of which era? By the superethics of which of their gods should we weigh all the tangled threads of lives lived and life’s circumstances? This knot cannot be untied, and the “civilization of forgiveness” itself is still far too far over the horizon. The question of whether purgatory or similar constructs are needed is best left to future, more mature generations.

For those whose actions in life were criminal — and the behavioral norms of, say, a Viking are almost entirely criminal by modern law — the answer is the same as for everyone: resurrection is a new birth, not a verdict and not a trial. The difference between cases is not about who deserves what, but about how much work gentle adaptation will take, and how much needs to be prepared in the historical reconstruction of that person’s period. Hence the order of priority: from simple cases to complex ones, and this will have to be learned in practice rather than in theory — though even now, the case of a pharaoh clearly looks far more complex than that of a hussar.

Trying to handpick or turn the whole of humanity into nothing but well-behaved “little angels” would clearly be a mistake. The need to divide people into those worthy and unworthy of salvation is a very archaic notion of rightness. It may have been deliberately built into revered religious texts long ago, in order to point the moral compass in the right direction and simplify complex ethical subtleties.

We must not forget that religious texts were written for people who lived more than a thousand years ago, not for our contemporaries.

By trying to sterilize and refine humanity based solely on our current ideas of what is good, we will inevitably lose something vital—something that lies far beyond our always highly limited personal perspectives.

A metaphor about seeds

Each person, after “extraction” , should be perceived as a seed. Each such seed from the past represents a unique combination of genes, experience, cultural context, and life circumstances. It is precisely in this uniqueness and diversity of individuals that their enduring value lies.

A seed is potential, not a final form. Once placed in new soil, each resurrected person will be able to continue their unique evolution, gaining fundamentally new, unprecedented opportunities and tools for personal development and transformation.

Together, this diversity of individuals will create even more conscious and varied movement. Life is movement, and all we can do is wonder where and to what end it is directed.

Perhaps this is how the Universe seeks to know itself through myriads of our small personal perspectives of observation and understanding. Perhaps learning and development are fundamental properties of living matter, embedded in its original code. Perhaps there is some intention that we are not yet able to fully comprehend.

But one thing is clear: diversity, even excessive diversity, is critically important for life. In uniformity and sterile “correctness” there is no movement, and therefore no life.

Transformation through immersion

“Extractions” represent a manifold increase in the potential diversity of human experience and activity. Entering a new environment—perhaps one partly orchestrated for gentle adaptation—the resurrected person will find themselves drawn into a web of circumstances and life situations that will inevitably begin to change them.

A person will begin to evolve mentally, reconsidering their prejudices and assumptions, which we all carry in abundance. They will be especially successful in this if helped by experienced mentors—those who have already undergone a similar transformation.

Through new understanding, each person will be able to look differently at their past, at actions—both their own and others'. They will understand the deep reasons behind them, and through this understanding, perhaps forgive what seemed unforgivable.

Octaves of perception and empathy

In the future, what will change a person will be not only what they are able to understand intellectually, but also what they are able to feel. And here we approach the question of the sensory limitations of the person themselves.

Today each individual has a rather limited range of perception. A general of the security services who has spent half his life defending borders from external threats; a pop star living in a world of fame and worship; a young woman who has spent many years meditating in an Indian ashram—all of them are on one planet, but inhabit completely different worlds. Their sensory ranges are mutually almost inaccessible.

Imagine: the full range of possible feelings, sensations, and states—it is like a piano the size of a barge. But each person currently has access to approximately one octave of this grand instrument.

Some are luckier—such people perceive several octaves, and the world is richer and more diverse for them. Others are less fortunate—they play the symphony of their lives on just three notes.

Someone pathologically hammers away at a single key, hoarding money and power on a scale that impoverishes entire nations, while all the rest of life's rich diversity simply does not touch them— they are deaf to these frequencies.

These kinds of distortions, addictions, and limitations can be treated by expanding the range of perception and increasing openness to the new .

This will require a comprehensive approach, including both experiential therapy and direct technological intervention—perhaps even through partial voluntary re-imprinting and restructuring of the body's dopamine reward system .

Elon Musk's Neuralink project promises in the future not only to read specific thoughts, but also emotions—recording them in high resolution and subsequently transmitting them to another person. Someday, it will be possible to share an entire personal worldview, which in itself could lead to a radical reassessment of values.

It will be possible to read and transmit not only positive experiences. Nearly a million civilians died during the war and the humanitarian disaster that followed it in Iraq—for us now this is simply statistics, as are the figures from Libya, Syria, and other conflicts.

But what did the survivors feel, whose homes were destroyed, whose fates were shattered, whose relatives were killed? If people had access not only to biased news, but to the actual sensations and experiences of those affected in real time, if they could feel the true scale of the tragedy, entirely different decisions would be made. And they would probably be made in a different way.

From division to unity

Groups of primitive hunter-gatherers usually did not exceed 100–150 people, where all tribe members knew and felt each other perfectly. Agriculture allowed the population to grow significantly, but as a result of this scaling, people lost mutual connections and became globally divided. This spawned systemic contradictions—and those who learned to exploit them.

Various approaches—both social and technological—are potentially possible for restoring lost unity. Perhaps the internet itself will transform into something like a collective mind, becoming a sort of extension of personality for each individual, and then significant decisions will be made through some form of direct collective consensus, rather than at parliamentary hearings by a handful of corrupt representatives.

It is difficult to predict the specific mechanisms of these changes. But it is important to understand: the past is not a life sentence. Perhaps what now seems unforgivable, given new circumstances, will lose its edge over time—as old quarrels lose theirs. Or perhaps not: one cannot rely on this as a mechanism, and the question of what to do with the unforgiven and those who have not forgiven, and on what principles to separate them into different corners of the Hyperworld, remains unresolved.

A civilization of forgiveness

The project of universal resurrection is not simply a technological achievement. It is a project of creating a civilization, capable of accepting all the diversity of human experience, including its dark sides, and transforming this diversity into richness.

Each resurrected person is not an object for judgment, but a subject for development. Every individual, whatever they were at the moment of death, will be given a chance at transformation, at expanding their perception, at understanding and forgiveness.

In this context, these “extractions” are not simply a return to life, but an invitation to participate in a grand project of the emergence of a new, more complex and harmonious form of intelligent life.

Forms in which diversity is not a source of conflict but the basis for a symphony, where every note, even a dissonant one, finds its place in the overall harmony.

Is this utopia? Perhaps. But all of human history is movement from the impossible to the possible. And if we learn to resurrect the dead, we will also learn to create conditions for their genuine transformation and integration—into a unified yet infinitely diverse whole.

Power and the security architecture for a hundred billion people

The modern order is based on the power of some people over others and the state's monopoly on the use of force. Out of habit, it is difficult to think within any other system of ideas, difficult even to imagine the very existence of an alternative —a world where power as such is absent for lack of need.

Our entire history is a chronicle of domination and submission, of hierarchies and revolutions, of tyrants and liberators. We are steeped in this rather combative paradigm—the absence of power seems synonymous with chaos.

Technological freedom or total control?

In a purely hypothetical version of a future society, perhaps one person would be physically unable to strike another without their consent. No acts of aggression—verbal, psychological, or physical—would be possible if the recipient did not wish to accept them.

But how to actually achieve this while remaining in a biological body is still unclear. We can, of course, fantasize about neural interfaces, which block aggressive impulses, or nanobots, which paralyze muscles when violence is attempted. But who will control these systems? And won't they become an instrument of total enslavement under the guise of absolute safety?

Hierarchy as a necessity?

Today's systems have built-in hierarchies without which they inevitably fall apart. Is it worth dreaming of rights and freedoms separated from responsibility—or separated entirely from a regulator in the form of power structures?

Now at least we can think calmly and philosophically debate this topic without fearing the Inquisition's rack or crucifixion by order of a Roman procurator.

Anarchism is a general term for systems of ideas that reject the necessity of coercive governance and the power of one person over another. Anarchists advocate for self-governance; there are many different schools of thought that often diverge on various issues, from secondary to fundamental. The branches of anarchist philosophy span a wide spectrum of ideas, from extreme individualism to stateless communism. Some anarchists reject any form of coercion and violence altogether—for example, Tolstoyans, representatives of Christian anarchism.

The vulnerability of any architecture

The very presence of a governing structure in the Hyperworld is an obvious vulnerability:

• Centralized power can be compromised from outside.
• It can mutate from within.
• Control can be seized.
• The governance system may lose relevance—and then it will collapse from internal contradictions caused by new circumstances and new understanding in the mechanics of social interactions.

A decentralized system of governance and power is also not without its flaws and vulnerabilities. How do you create a code with an inviolable foundation of statements and principles for centuries and millennia ?

If its principles must be flexible—the question arises: how flexible, and to what extent can they transform? If you lay down rigid, fundamental foundations—they will become obsolete and turn into shackles.

Given that we are talking about the fates of at least a hundred billion people, errors in the basic architecture can lead to catastrophic consequences.

A jar of spiders or harmony?

The approaches used today to ensure social compromise are not merely imperfect—they are unstable even on the scale of centuries. The history of the twentieth century is the collapse of all great ideologies: communism, fascism, and now liberal democracy, which is experiencing a profound crisis.

It seems that fundamentally different approaches to regulation will have to be built into the foundation of the Hyperworld. But what kind?

A world of people deprived of shared principles, ideas, and convictions inevitably mutates into a jar of spiders, devouring one another. Is it even possible for real humanistic systems without super-coercion — in the form of God’s super-ethics — to exist?

The root of wars

Some kind of shared, overriding ethic, setting priorities, is necessary to prevent the system from falling apart from internal contradictions. A new ontology and a new ethic based on it can be formulated using the ideas of Russian cosmism.

But what to do with those who refuse to share this ethic? And what will this minority (or majority) surely try to do in the future—simply because they are strong and can?

Here it is—the inextinguishable root of war. But is it truly inextinguishable? And do we even need to eradicate it?

Stakes and responsibility

We are not discussing abstract political philosophy, but the potential fates of a hundred billion resurrected people. An error in designing the social architecture of the Hyperworld could turn into an eternal hell for billions of beings.

Inaction is also a choice. Leaving everything as it is means condemning humanity to eternal reproduction of cycles of structural violence, only now on the scale of an immortal civilization.

The paradox is that creating a world without power may require an unprecedented concentration of power. Someone will have to decide on the basic principles of the Hyperworld. Someone will have to implement them. And this “someone” will wield power exceeding that of all the tyrants in history combined. I have no answer to this, and I won't pretend that I do. The hope that humanity will have matured by then is a hope, not a solution. The question remains open, and it may be the most important of all raised on these pages.

We will probably have to shape a vision of a new global consensus. A detailed transition plan, one we cannot even imagine today — just as people of the eighteenth century could not imagine internet democracy.

For now, we are left to think, argue, and search. Because the quality of our search determines whether the future becomes a paradise of freedom or a hell of good intentions.

The Trap of Freedom

A BBC production, 2007 — “The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom?”

This is an excellent film about the crisis of humanism. Why do politicians talk about freedom so often, yet the more we hear that word from them, the less freedom society actually seems to have?

The film's director examines the roots of what is happening with scrupulous precision, like a surgeon slicing layer after layer through the strata of Western civilization's political and social order, revealing to us what we had forgotten — or never even suspected.

The freedom to choose one's appearance in the era of radical longevity

Our assumptions about any fixed correspondence between age and appearance will, in any case, change dramatically once we gain the freedom to alter that very appearance radically. A comprehensive technology for reversing aging in the human body and rejuvenating it is, in itself, already a significant intervention in appearance.

It may even become possible to rewrite the genome of a living organism in every single cell and every mitochondrion, right in the course of its life — building on the principles of the already-existing CRISPR/Cas9 technology, for which the Nobel Prize was awarded in 2020.

Appearance as a choice

A person aged 200 or 500 years will most likely look however they themselves want to look. Perhaps like a gray-haired, energetic elder; perhaps like a young man or woman; or perhaps even like some character out of a video game or a film. Appearance will be a matter of choice.

The first transformation of appearance will probably be a lengthy process, since the psyche will need time to adapt in order to comfortably preserve self-identity and self-recognition. Later transformations, should they be needed, can happen faster, but the first one will be more cosmetic, rejuvenating, and health-restoring in character.

Changing social norms

People's very conception of appearance, and the patterns of what counts as an acceptable match, will change. Many spouses will probably discuss their planned modifications together in advance, in one way or another.

Children who were “extracted” before their parents can, if they wish, bring their bodies into line with the images their loved ones remember them by, in time for the first meeting. A startlingly precocious toddler might, of course, make a shocking impression on unprepared parents — in such cases, one option is adding 8–12 years of apparent age, so the parents will likely recognize them by sight as well. In any case, their feelings will most likely come through.

Adapting to the new reality

A great deal of attention will be devoted to the psychological adaptation of the “extracted”. One element of this will be recreating a familiar setting at first — possibly even, individually, a specific house or apartment, the range of groceries and goods at the nearby store, and so on. A kind of local retro-simulation.

The nature of aggression and ways to transform it

Aggression, violence, and the struggle for dominance within hierarchies are undoubtedly part of our biological nature. By trying to sterilize and refine only what we, in our own view, consider good, we inevitably lose something very deep and important in our essence. What's more, no amount of proper upbringing can reshape what biology has already predetermined — genes cannot be raised. You can make a lion perform in a circus, but that still leaves the question of how such an unnatural daily routine affects the quality of its life.

In any case, “extractions” involve entirely dissimilar people who have already formed as personalities, coming from different historical periods, with different upbringings and moral principles that will differ sharply even from those of today, let alone from those of the future.

The legacy of victors

All of us alive today are descendants of victors, a continuation of the best of the best — apex predators and master schemers who have repeatedly survived the harshest natural selection. Seriously believing there is no evil in you is, of course, a mistake. Everyone has a shadow, often not even recognized, or suppressed for the time being.

This inner evil can take hybrid forms, revealing itself not openly but, for instance, from the position of someone representing the correct point of view, the true religion, the law, justice, or even goodness. Our evil grants itself the right to act as it does, often trying to behave in a socially approved way, or at least to have a purely personal justification for what it does.

A character like Thomas Shelby, who is fully aware of who he is and what he does, is far more appealing than a scoundrel whose last refuge is patriotism. Each of us carries evil within us, and to think you have none of it in you, while living in a biological body, is very naive.

The devil begins with foam on the lips of an angel who has come to believe in his own rightness and gone into battle for a holy, righteous cause. The spirit of hatred in the struggle for a righteous cause is eternal. And thanks to it, evil on Earth has no end. Ever since I understood this, I have believed that the style of a polemic matters more than its subject — subjects change, while style is what creates civilization.— Grigory Pomerants

The externalization of evil

It is precisely the refusal to accept the evil within oneself that leads to its externalization (displacement) onto others — for instance, onto the invented figure of some tyrant supposedly to blame for everything, or onto a group of dissenters. Holding fast to their own goodness, even the especially “enlightened” and those who have found Zen sometimes cannot keep their inner filth from boiling over. This pressure looks for an outlet, and finds it in a personal attitude toward certain “categories” of other people, in the words that get said, and in the very posture of supposedly standing above everyone else.

Understanding and accepting the evil within ourselves gives us more freedom and more genuine choice. In each of us, in those very same chains of DNA, there is also good. Science still has a long way to go in unpacking the messages written in this language of nucleotides, and in understanding ever more deeply who we are, what we are part of, and what we pass on.

In various ways, both collectively and individually, we try to restrain and suppress these entirely natural manifestations of our biological nature, trying to fence ourselves off from our own nature, and even protesting, insisting that humans are not animals.

Possible solutions

There could be several solutions for the future. An intriguing concept is shown in the series Westworld (2016). It is possible to adjust the very essence of a human being — not necessarily by methods as crude as those in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. But any version of such an adjustment brings with it restriction, coercion — that is, the same old “violence for the greater good.” It will meet resistance, a new way of dividing people into “us” and “them” will be born, and, as a result, some new war will follow.

One could try a different path: creating places where everything unacceptable in civilized society is permitted — “war zones”, or zones of special rules. Far from everyone would want to visit such places, probably only a minority, but for the common good we need to think about that minority too.

What is bad is not even wars themselves, but the fact that people who wanted absolutely nothing to do with them get drawn into these events.

Zones of Special Rules

If war is your lot, or if at a certain stage of life your whole being craves such events, experiences, and trials, you don't need to hunt for a justifying ideology or some local truth. Go to a place specially created for that purpose, with limited risks, which you can only enter by choice, and drop out of only under the terms agreed on beforehand.

The conditions here could vary a great deal: a zone with firearms, or, say, only swords and arrows; the contract could even include the possibility of dying completely and for good — at an extremely small probability.

The basic principles are simple: if you want the chance to commit violence, to inflict harm, damage, or some amount of suffering, be ready to receive the same yourself, within that same chosen range. Everyone is on equal, or nearly equal, terms — those who risk more should probably also get more opportunities, or some kind of starting advantage.

Everyone's life is to be preserved using that same “extraction” technology, unless the contract specifies other probabilities. It won't be as simple as in a video game, of course — after a “lethal” wound, lying for several months in a World War II-era field hospital under shelling could be quite an adventure in itself, as could being stuck as a cripple for several years in the whole historical reenactment.

What happens in the zones of special rules stays there, and is not carried out afterward into the world where its inhabitants want no part in violence. What's described here isn't even a concept, but rather just a direction of thought.

War as a method of learning

Perhaps wars and confrontations in the modern world are also a kind of learning, in which victory is the arbiter and the incorruptible judge. Sometimes truth is not born in argument — it is only acknowledged in battle. Who exactly is to decide which is better, capitalism or socialism? Who is to later declare that an optimally rational combination of the two in a single system is best? How could this be stated with such authority and certainty that everyone agrees? Does everyone, without exception, even need to agree and stop looking for other, better ways?

Perhaps wars will remain in the future too, and not merely as historical simulations for those willing to take part. War as a method of learning may become different, even more varied, since even now it is, at its core, primarily informational. At its root it is a struggle of meanings, of different vectors of movement, a dispute between different truths that together make up a single pattern.

One would like to hope that in the relatively near future we will somehow manage to remove such crude manifestations of conflict as tanks, shells, and similar lethal weapons. The hope that we will eventually manage to fix everything with the help of “extractions” or something similar is, for now, just a hope.

The Ultimate Ground

The ultimate ground — is the answer to the question of exactly what you personally are willing to kill and die for, in a situation where you don't want to do either one for its own sake. Even without an honest answer to this question, many people (across the planet as a whole) are capable of doing both, driven by a kind of “wind of history”. Specialists, meanwhile, are so skilled at whispering in their ears that the warriors never even stop to think about their own personal “ultimate ground”, and simply do what is wanted of them.

Only in the space of love is there no place for war.

Only in the space of love is there no place for war.

The evolution of ideas about paradise and the nature of the miracle

To a serf who is hungry and cold, whose days are filled with hard labor and cultural confinement, the idea of Paradise as a reward for the hardships and deprivations of earthly life may well seem thoroughly logical, fair, and coherent.

Legends of paradise

The Islamic Paradise includes carnal pleasures. There are legends telling how certain warriors who shared meals with spiritual leaders had psychotropic substances slipped into their food. While unconscious, they would then be carried to a special place of unimaginable luxury, gold, and splendor in every surrounding: fountains of wine, a great many beautiful, attentive women, an abundance of various delicacies. After letting them enjoy all these delights for a short while, the warriors would be drugged again and brought back to the table with the spiritual leader, after which the idea was planted in their heads that this had supposedly been a glimpse of paradise, and that they would be able to reach it after death if they stayed faithful, were ready to give their lives, and kept what they had seen secret.

These warriors had never before seen anything so wondrous, and could not even imagine that such a place could possibly be created by human hands. It was, in short, a remarkable method for recruiting loyal commanders and personal bodyguards.

The transformation of meanings

Today, members of the middle class in developed countries have access to noticeably more than the kings of the past ever did. At the same time, what exactly, as a reward for “correct behavior”, awaits these people in Paradise becomes less obvious, once everything imaginable can quite realistically be obtained right here on earth. For many people, their faith alone is enough to make them follow religious dogma — for many people, yes, but certainly not for everyone.

The value of the otherworldly and the unthinkable — how is one even to assess it for oneself? Eternal life in Paradise as such, and the impossibility of dying even if you wanted to, could, perhaps, turn out to be its own kind of torment. The value of eternal life is, after all, subjective, and depends on one's personal attitude toward it, which could well change over millennia: “eternal is good,” “non-eternal is bad” is a very crude simplification — it's just that, for now, hardly anyone thinks that far ahead.

It isn't customary in the religious community to reason critically about any of this. The main point of these remarks is not that God does not exist, or that paradise does not exist, but that our conceptions of it — what it is, where it is located, and how it might all be arranged — are quite possibly simplified, incomplete, and archaic. The descriptions of Paradise themselves were created by, and for, people who lived centuries and even millennia ago.

Conceptually, paradise is still presented as simply something very good, immeasurable by earthly standards, beyond full comprehension or experience. In other words, you are essentially asked just to believe that you will feel good there, and it is marketed as a kind of grand prize.

The choice is obvious

But the truth, obvious enough today, is what most people today will choose once the opportunity itself arises: either do nothing, grow old, and then go off to the Almighty's “Last Judgment”, or extend one's earthly life by a century in a young, healthy body by means of biotechnology — and then extend it again, and again. This choice is exactly the same as deciding whether or not to take the medicine your doctor prescribed.

Using the argument that a divine Paradise exists, in order to bribe people with it, sounds somewhat tasteless in itself, since it is the very same coercion, just delivered with a carrot instead of a stick. The same, in general, goes for the argument from the existence of hell. What kind of “love” for people is this, that some of them are later sent off to a special place full of fire, smoke, heat, suffering, and pain, there to be tormented, to burn, to suffocate, to scream, to weep for all eternity, until the end of time. Something here isn't right..

Paradise engineering

Various approaches to paradise engineering — that is, to building a man-made “paradise on Earth” — are potentially possible. One example being https://www.bltc.com which draws attention to the fact that we are ignoring the biochemical roots of our poor well-being, and proposes a shift to a post-Darwinian era. It speaks of the possibility of eliminating pain and suffering entirely. The noise of political parties and geopolitics distracts us from what actually needs to be done.

Evolutionarily, pain/pleasure and avoidance/pursuit are the driving force, the incentives for development and learning. Whether this engine can be replaced, for intelligent life, with a more modern one running on different principles and a different fuel is a fairly open question, but people will certainly try.

The search for a great hope

An alternative course of history, with humanity's ascent, a “new word” — what is it now? Is it a multipolar world, whose parts, as before, will keep building up strength in order to oppose, or even destroy, one another? Or will multipolarity itself make the interactions among its participants fairer and less bloody? More likely the opposite. Where is that hope — historical, great — and what is it resting on?

Godmanhood is the ideal state of humanity as a limit, as the completion of the earthly historical process. The idea of Godmanhood received philosophical treatment in the works of the religious thinker Vladimir Solovyov. It is a dream-image that accompanies, in the view of the philosopher Berdyaev, humanity striving toward “truth — the meaning of its own existence — and freedom.”

The Nature of the Miracle

A few paragraphs about miracles.

Put briefly — they don't happen, but they do occur, and this statement implies there's no contradiction in it. A miracle is part of objective reality, a possibility that always exists but stays hidden from us. It is that which is possible yet entirely absent from our picture of reality.

If something suddenly breaks into our own, always limited tunnel of reality that, by our own assumptions, simply cannot exist there, such a situation cannot be ignored. The occurrence demands space, demands an explanation, and by its very presence already transforms our reality. About a genuine miracle, before it happens, we probably can't even say that it's impossible, because we're not able to even frame the question that way — possible or impossible. We can't even imagine that such a thing could happen at all, and then suddenly — “BANG” — and it already has.

The Probabilistic Miracle and the True Miracle

Suppose someone drowns in an icy mountain stream, and 30 minutes later is pulled out, with resuscitation specialists bringing them back to a full life. Or suppose a person spends years on a life-support machine, and then, for some reason, comes out of the coma. These situations are not about a true miracle, but a probabilistic one.

The resurrection of Lazarus by Jesus, if that fact indeed took place, is a miracle. Although Christianity is not the first religion to mention the resurrection of the dead: for the Jews who were contemporaries of Pontius Pilate, the resurrection of Lazarus could have been perceived as an utterly unthinkable event, confronting them with a fact that simply could not be — one they had never even considered as possible or impossible. For them, an event of that magnitude is precisely what a miracle is.

The Manipulation of the Miracle

The priests of the Maya people, understanding certain patterns, could predict the dates of solar eclipses, which they used to bolster their own authority and power. They staged entire shows on these days, offering sacrifices and feeding their own self-serving interpretation of the event to their uneducated people, for whom what they saw was, of course, a genuine miracle. Christopher Columbus cynically used a similar trick, but with a lunar eclipse, to intimidate the natives of Jamaica into supplying his men with provisions.

A modern light show produced by a laser installation can create the illusion of a building’s columns dancing, along with other astonishing visual transformations. Had something like this been shown 300 years ago in the Vatican, with the face of the reigning pontiff of the time projected onto St. Peter’s Basilica in the process, all that would remain would be to offer one’s own interpretation of what happened to the stunned public. How is that not one-hundred-percent proof of God’s existence? How many people, at that, would have been capable of doubting such proof, presented in the form of a manifest miracle?

A miracle is merely a manifestation of what lies beyond the limits of our personal knowledge and understanding of the world. To people who will live 300 years from now, we are just as ignorant and savage as those Catholics, whose witch burnings alone claimed tens of thousands of victims, might seem to us.

The problem of personal identity: the boundaries of “I” and “not-I”

Are the caterpillar, the chrysalis, and the butterfly they eventually become one creature or three different ones? Clearly, these are three organisms completely unlike one another in structure and function. So why do some people believe this is one creature, merely at different stages of its development and transformation? What exactly unites these three entirely different organisms into one? Remember your current answer to this question, if you already have one.

The division thought experiment

Let us conduct a thought experiment. Imagine that a person, in some operating room of the future, was “cut” in half into two equal parts, from the crown of the head downward. Then special medical robots use external material to complete both halves, perfectly reconstructing the missing body parts to make them whole. The result is two completely physically identical, living human beings. They wake up in different rooms, after which one of them, without being informed of what happened, is sent to a loving family, and the other — to a hypothetical concentration camp.

Where does the personality that existed before this operation go? Was the personality destroyed (killed) in the process, or did it split in two, so that it is now one and the same person, but with two bodies whose sensory connection has been severed? And where, in that case, did the esoteric soul go, if such a thing existed, and could it have remained in only one of these bodies?

We can modify the thought experiment and, instead of cutting the person in half, use the same medical robots to assemble a copy exact down to every atom, and immediately afterward ensure that no information survives as to which person is the original and which is the assembled copy. If no differences can be found, can it be claimed that this is one and the same individual? If it turns out that a year ago he committed a crime, should both be put in prison, or what? If a court cannot afford to make mistakes and punish those who did not personally commit a crime, does that mean one could avoid guaranteed punishment by creating a copy of oneself in one way or another?

As technology develops, more and more questions like these will arise — questions it is unclear how to even begin answering. What if, by some artificial technical means, the sensory connection between this pair of people could be preserved, creating a permanent link between the original and their copy, synchronizing their shared memory, sensations, emotions, and vision? Could it then be said that this is one person existing simultaneously in two different places?

From philosophy to engineering

From a purely philosophical domain, the question of personal identity has today already shifted into the domain of engineering, where it has taken on an ethical character. For example, in operations for the partial separation of the hemispheres in epilepsy patients, which were practiced in the 1960s. Symptoms began to appear suggesting that, after the operation, there were now two personalities in one brain, that control over the body was divided between them, and that internal conflicts were even possible.

Dogmas such as “one body always corresponds to one observer” greatly cloud our judgment when analyzing the very problem of the integrity and indivisibility of the self.

The illusion of simplicity

If you don't stop to think about it, all of this can seem simple. “I” am me, I have a head, I eat with it — what could possibly be unclear here. ㋛ But if you dig a little deeper and try to understand what we actually mean when we say “I,” a dangerous abyss opens up, one whose edges are nowhere to be seen.

Where does the boundary between “I” and “not-I” lie? In reality, it is not as obvious as is commonly believed.

Violating these natural certainties leads to very serious consequences when we talk about the development of biotechnology and even about certain medical facts that already exist. We do not know how to interpret this, because our natural “cognitive intuition” simply lies to us. At the same time, this is, quite literally, a matter of life and death.

There exists an innate knowledge, a default setting, or something that forms automatically at an early stage of a child's development — namely, the belief that “I” am my body, and “not-I” is everything else. Such a simplified view, if you think it through, is mistaken.

The Body as a Boundary

People sometimes lose limbs, some replace them with bionic prosthetics, transplant surgeons transplant organs, and portable artificial mechanical hearts are already being implanted temporarily. At the beginning of the last century, this would have been unthinkable. Today, given these realities, to still insist that “I” am literally my entire body is, at the very least, strange.

Where exactly is the observer who interprets two different electrochemical signals from two different eyes as a single image?

Back when medical anesthesia was not as advanced as it is today, there existed a type of it in which the patient, during the operation, felt the pain in full, but was completely unable to move or react, and afterward, following the operation, had no memory of what had happened to them. The question is not whether it was acceptable to use such anesthesia. Even earlier, limbs shattered in battle were sawed off by hand in field hospitals to save lives, and this was done with no anesthesia at all.

If an operation is necessary to save a life right now, should the patient be told that under such anesthesia they will feel everything, or should this be withheld, letting them encounter such terrifying events unexpectedly and in complete helplessness? If you yourself don’t remember and don’t know, are you willing to accept that this happened, or will happen in the future, to someone other than you? And what if you don’t remember, but you do know? This example relates to the question of identification and the subjective boundaries between “I” and “not-I.”

Digital immortality

In the series “Altered Carbon”, all the information about one of the participants in these events is stored in a “cloud” on servers — all their memory, all the data needed to recreate an identical body. This data can be synchronized continuously or from time to time. If such a person is physically eliminated, in the series they are fairly quickly recreated by special machines, and their property rights and power pass to the recreated person.

These circumstances make it pointless to kill them with, say, a simple shot to the head, but whether the recreated person is the same as the one before, and whether the shooting itself actually constituted murder, or whether a court would interpret it merely as attempted murder — the answer isn't so clear-cut.

The Brain as “I”

With the advancement of science, more and more people have come to link the subject of consciousness with the brain. The next most popular assumption is that “I” am my brain, or even just a part of it (a neural network). But then exactly which part of the neural network is “I”? Let's again try to draw a boundary between “I” and “not-I”, to physically separate one from the other.

And if we stop to think about it, it turns out that “I” am not the entire neural network — if only because even significant losses to it from a stroke, another illness, or an injury still leave intact what we're accustomed to calling the personality. Every day, even in a healthy person, roughly 80,000 neurons die off irreversibly.

At exactly what moment does an embryo acquire its subjectivity? At a certain stage it has only two neurons — is this already a human being, or not yet? Then exactly how many neurons are needed to count as human? There's no way to argue for a specific number; you cannot draw a line anywhere in a continuous process. This isn't about the ethics, or lack of it, of abortion at one stage or another — it concerns the lives of people who are already adults, too.

Are the embryo, the girl, and later the grandmother all one and the same person, consciousness, personality, individual? And are these four words complete synonyms, or not quite?

Memory as “I”

There is also a version of the belief that “I” am my knowledge and memory.

If someone loses their memory — in the case of retrograde amnesia, say — does that mean we should consider them temporarily dead? Or are we satisfied that they look more or less the same on the outside, and so assume this is the same person, whose life was never interrupted? Except a copy would look even more similar, and remember everything completely, even while the original from the first thought experiment is off somewhere far away. Similarity is not a criterion of identity.

A one-year-old girl and the grandmother she later becomes share no common memory of events — so why do we consider them one and the same person? Nearly all the cells in the human body are renewed within a single year; practically all the matter our bodies are made of changes over a decade. So what connection is there between the one-year-old girl and the grandmother she will turn into over the years? They don't even look alike, they are not the same, and they are different in every sense.

Such a girl and grandmother are, of course, the same citizen—there is no arguing with that. Today, a tax ID and social security number are issued right at birth. But a citizen is simply an invented, artificially created concept.

Identity Over Time

The continuity of personality over time is called identity. The conviction that my “I” a minute ago was also “I”, and that in a year it will still be “I”, is a kind of belief of ours — one that is, of course, absolutely necessary for evolution, goal-setting, and so on, but that has never been proven by anyone or anything. In essence, it's simply an axiom, a concept, a fiction. If we accept the idea of temporal continuity, paradoxes arise — for instance, we would have to admit that A = B (the girl = the grandmother), even though from the standpoint of formal logic and its criteria this is obviously not so. So when exactly did the girl die, if, once the grandmother exists, the girl is already gone?

We can single out three sub-questions:

• The question of separating “I” from “not-I” in space alone.
• The question of dividing into “I” and “not-I” over the lifetime of a single conscious organism (temporal continuity).
• The question of deep metamorphosis — as in the case of a major transformation of the organism itself (and/or its brain) from caterpillar to butterfly. Where, in this process, is that very “I” located, and what defines it, and at what moment does it disappear (die), assuming, of course, that we accept the idea that it does perish in this process at all?

Radical Transformation

What if we were to run some artificial program to transform a particular caterpillar into a living human being, or, conversely, a living human being into a caterpillar? Gaining or losing mass in the process isn't really the hard part — what matters is the essence of the thought experiment itself. Or, instead of a caterpillar, say, a dolphin, one just as intelligent as a human. Would we go on congratulating it on its birthday every year, as before? And if the metamorphosis turns it into an ordinary dolphin rather than an intelligent one — try to pin down the exact moment at which we would have to declare that this is no longer a citizen, no longer a human being, and that it's time to revoke their social security number.

Advocates of transhumanism accept the possibility, and the desirability, of radical interventions in human nature for the sake of enhancement — including for people who are already alive. Where is the line between life, death, and the birth of a new subject in the course of such a metamorphosis? Death can be imperceptible, not so obvious, and need not involve a corpse or funeral rites. What happens after this or that surgical, or non-surgical, operation on the neural correlate of consciousness — the brain? Which technologies are worth introducing, and which are not, because they would lead to an implicit death?

The question of what “I” is, of where the boundary between “I” and “not-I” lies, is perhaps the central and most practical question in each of our lives.

Resurrection or Recreation

It's quite possible that in the future it will become feasible to extract the information (or calculate it mathematically) about the precise mutual arrangement of the atoms making up a particular person's entire body from the past — say, an instant before their brain's activity finally stopped. Having obtained such a complete imprint of the body, and using nanotechnology, it would be possible to assemble it atom by atom and bring it back to life — immediately beginning to resuscitate, treat, and rejuvenate it. Could this be called a full resurrection, or only a recreation — that is, the creation of copies? Is there a difference?

Perhaps physical and psychological continuity have some bearing on the question of what should count as a person. If we accept the idea that consciousness is itself this continuous process, then do we die every time we fall asleep? Is it a different person who is revived from deep medical anesthesia, or after clinical death? Or how, then, should we think about such an interruption of the process?

On some questions, our everyday logic and intuition lead us astray — and in some cases this error can even be proven, as, for example, in the three-door paradox.

The Transfer of Consciousness

Biological matter is no different from any other kind. According to our current scientific understanding, what people are made of today was once part of stars. What would happen if we tried to carry out a gradual transfer of consciousness from a biological substrate to a different one? First we replace one neuron with something artificial in construction but functionally identical; then another neuron, a cell, or even a small cluster. As a result of such successive replacements, we would end up with a kind of cyborg with a silicon (or some other) brain, steel fists, and so on.

Someone might say that such a “cyborg” is, in fact, the very same person, deriving identity from continuity — that is, from the fact that there was no such sharp boundary at which one could say the human being ended and the cyborg began. One wonders, though: if the soul exists, would it move along too, into this new synthetic body? And if we assume it doesn't move but instead departs, we'd need to clarify — at exactly what moment? Exactly how many neurons would need to be swapped out before we could say with confidence that the soul has left the body? How could one even give a reasoned answer to such questions?

Soul and Matter

By applying a biochemical or microsurgical method to a fertilized human egg cell right after its first division, we can separate the two resulting cells from one another, which would produce identical twins instead of the single individual who would otherwise have developed from an undisturbed cell. Similar experiments have been carried out successfully, and repeatedly, on animals. A brief, crude physical intervention would bring about two lives, two personalities, where before there was only one. In a sense, it turns out you can create another life just as simply as that. Perhaps we should think of it as having destroyed one life and created two, since neither of the resulting individuals will turn out to be exactly what the original individual would have been. Who is there to ask about what happens to the soul in this process, if anything does, and at precisely what moment?

If we suppose that one of the twins produced this way becomes the continuation of the person who was meant to be born, while the other does not — even though the division was perfectly symmetrical — this would mean that the material world contains incomplete information about its entire makeup. Such a supposition is an uncomfortable and inconvenient one for strictly materialist thinking.

If there is something in the universe that doesn't operate according to physical laws, something governed by an immaterial soul, then presumably we ought to be able to detect the fact of this influence and intervention, and somehow measure and record it. Otherwise, what exactly are we even talking about when we use the word “soul”? If we're talking about something that isn't present in the material world and has no effect on it whatsoever, then we are talking about something that doesn't exist, in the strict ontological sense of the word. But if something isn't present in the material world and yet still exerts an influence on it, that's a different matter entirely — and in that case, the fact of this influence could probably be detected somehow.

Brain transplantation

Surgeons today are already capable of transplanting hearts, and in time they'll be able to transplant brains too. Picture two male patients — one has a brain sarcoma, the other liver sarcoma with metastases, both inoperable. In the end, let's say, the healthy brain is transplanted into the healthy body. What results is a man who will only be able to father children through the body of another citizen, which he acquired in the transplant. Whose name goes on the discharge papers? What happens to family and property rights? And a genetic paternity test, say, which part of the body would it even be taken from afterward? With souls, once again, it's total confusion.

On what grounds do we assume that the soul is located specifically in the brain? Why not in the heart, say, or perhaps distributed through the blood, or somewhere else? Let's imagine a thoroughly fantastical scenario: four citizens swap brains in a circle, and in pairs at that — men with women. Where, in that case, would their souls end up? Can souls change not just bodies, but sex, too?

Freedom of self-determination

We are what we think about ourselves, what we identify with. One can identify with Napoleon, or with the ox from the parable, and believe that “I” will go on in my children, in the works of art I myself created, or will be reincarnated anew in another body of another race, or will even go on existing as a representative of flora or fauna. We are free to choose whichever identity is most convenient or pleasing to us, to believe in it, to deceive ourselves, and to remain in illusion.

So many question marks in this piece. There are no answers — in short, on close examination, every hypothesis and preconception here turns out to be untenable. But if you want to dive deeper into these questions, there's a video that runs 3.5 hours — and that's where it gets truly deep.

Creating the future together

Truly new thoughts and ideas are like paths traced through the darkness of the unexplored territories of the possible. Others may follow them after you: they will rethink them, add their own, turn them into roads — or even into well-lit highways.

Let us try together to imagine the society of the distant future in the most optimistic scenario. A world where cultures of different historical eras may coexist; where you can move from one recreated era into another; where the resurrected gradually settle ever new lands — on Earth and far beyond it. This is not a single picture of the future, but an entire Universe, in the most literal sense.

How do you personally picture such a world? There is room enough here for everyone's thought. You could reflect on ethics: what rights and freedoms people should have, and where their limits lie. On everyday life, leisure and technology: how to arrange the coexistence of eras, the transit between them, the reception and settlement of newcomers. On the life of entire planets — or of a single street where people from different centuries are neighbours. You don't have to think it all through to the end: even a single thought or a sketch is already a great deal. And if an idea seems wholly unfamiliar, never mind: in unexplored territories it rarely happens otherwise.

And perhaps the most fascinating question of all: where would you personally go first in such a world? And after that?

Anyone can contribute, and it is better to invent the future together: to devise, to draw, to work out the details, to visualise the goal, to search for meanings for our species. Little by little, a shared image of the desired future will take shape. And the more attention we give it, the greater the chance that it will work as a positive self-fulfilling prophecy.

Our shared Telegram chat is like a campfire at a rest stop, where people share their plans and routes. Bring your thoughts, texts, and drawings there, and tag them with the hashtag #образ_будущего, so they don't get lost in the conversation and are easy to find. And read what others write: ask questions, add to them, argue kindly — your own thought often grows out of someone else's. We'll be waiting for you by the fire!

What you can do

1. Perhaps the most significant contribution to the “Common Task” is simply to discuss the ideas of the Russian cosmists with someone you know. The butterfly effect — or rather, a whole swarm of butterflies — is, if anything, underestimated in the long run. What's more, we're all connected by roughly six degrees of separation — in time, the information will travel down the chain and reach key participants capable of amplifying it and developing it further. The most ordinary conversation about these ideas can noticeably affect the distant future: significant thoughts and words, like waves, bounce off people again and again, carry on into eternity, and give rise to our future.
2. Second — and this isn't about cosmism. Notice how you yourself talk about death: “we'll all end up there,” “that's life,” “everyone has their time.” That isn't wisdom — it's acceptance, a form of civilizational learned helplessness. Noticing that acceptance in yourself is already work, and it's work you don't need anyone's approval to do.
3. If you're professionally familiar with Russian cosmism, you may notice errors in the site's texts — in dates, in the attribution of quotes, or in which ideas are attributed to whom. Some of these have already been found and are being corrected, but some may have gone unnoticed. Point them out — the fix will be made, and the disputed spot will get a link to a reliable source. Contact email: ru.cosmism@gmail.com
4. If you work in philosophy or the humanities, take note: a few spots remain in the site's texts that look weak and that we haven't yet managed to fully shore up. What's needed here isn't support — a well-argued objection is worth more. If you take apart one of these weak spots and show that it doesn't hold up, that will accomplish more than dozens of mere reposts.
5. You can take part in meetings and projects of the RC within communities of like-minded people. Saint Petersburg — the Scientific Society of Cosmists: https://космизм.рф https://t.me/russian_cosmism Moscow — the portal of the N. Fyodorov Museum-Library: https://nffedorov.ru https://vk.com/muzejfedorova
6. You can send a link to https://russian-cosmism.ru to someone you know, or share it in a chat or comment where you yourself take part in discussions.
7. When your children start wondering about their own mortality, and yours, explain it to them something like this: if a special pill against aging could be invented, everyone would be able to live for an indefinitely long time — it's just that scientists haven't invented it yet. This kind of imprinting has a decisive influence on a person's later reactions, on the shaping of their values and priorities, and ultimately on their behavior as a whole. It's worth explaining why this item is even on the list. A child will get an answer one way or another — from you, from other adults, from the surrounding culture. There's no avoiding the answer: avoidance is itself an answer, and it, too, shapes an attitude — just someone else's. The usual answer — “that's just how it is, everyone dies” — was the only possible one for as long as aging had nothing to counter it. The historical moment is different now, though not everyone has noticed yet. The point is for the first answer to this question to match today's state of affairs, rather than yesterday's.
8. Grow within yourself a heart that is not a cardboard box stuffed with memes, but a fragment of one of the elements. Our conscience creates ideals, and reason looks for ways to attain them.