Mykola Iabluchanskyi

Every human life begins with an unanswered question: why is there a world that appears to me at all? Before we learn any scientific language, before we acquire theories of matter or mind, we wake into lived experience — color, warmth, sound, presence. Whatever the universe may be in itself, we only ever encounter it as something that shows up for a conscious subject. This is not a philosophical curiosity. It is the most immediate fact of existence. Yet the culture we have inherited tells a very different story. For most of modern history, we have been taught to inhabit a disenchanted cosmos: a vast, silent machine of dead matter governed by cold equations, in which consciousness is a freak accident — a brief flicker of light in a human brain produced by evolutionary luck. In this story, mind is our private invention, intelligence begins with us, and the universe beyond us is fundamentally mindless. This is the myth of Human Centrality , and it has shaped science, technology, and ethics...

When was the last time you made a decision and felt, with quiet certainty, “this is exactly how it needed to be”? Not just squeezing through under pressure, not choosing “let’s hope it somehow works out,” but experiencing a calm, grounded sense of rightness. If we look closely at such moments, the pattern repeats: you more or less understood what was happening, you saw a meaningful goal, you had at least minimal resources, you could count on honest feedback, and, most importantly, the decision felt truly yours, not imposed from outside. We call these conditions the five axes of decision ecology . When they are relatively healthy, even in catastrophic circumstances we retain the ability to choose in ways that do not destroy ourselves or those around us. When they are poisoned by distorted information, fear, or lack of support, we begin to suffer and act in ways we later do not recognize as our own. The Principle of Optimality lives inside this ecology: it describes how, under whatever...

Geoffrey Hinton has become one of the most important voices warning about the risks of artificial intelligence. His central concern is not sci‑fi robots wiping out humanity, but something much more subtle: AI systems that quietly shape what we see, what we choose, and what we believe—until human freedom fades without a clear moment of “attack.” In his view, the real danger is invisible steering rather than open domination. The book Natural Intelligence : The Recursive Evolution of Mind Through Substrates looks at the same situation from a deeper, more physical angle. It introduces Recursive Substrate Intelligence (RSI), a framework that treats intelligence as a universal natural process rather than a human invention. In RSI, intelligence appears wherever matter becomes complex and stable enough to build models, learn from feedback, and act with some form of agency. Neurons, computer chips, and future quantum systems are all different substrates for the same underlying phenomenon. ...

We have a complicated relationship with limits. In everyday thinking, a limit is a wall — something that blocks, diminishes, denies. But in biology, a limit is closer to a frame. And a frame, unlike a wall, is what makes a picture possible at all. This distinction matters enormously when we talk about human lifespan — because we have been misreading the frame for a long time, in both directions. --- The longest well-documented human life on record belonged to Jeanne Calment , a French woman who died in 1997 at 122 years and 164 days. Her age was verified by official documents, witness accounts, and gerontological review. It remains the most robustly confirmed case of extreme human longevity we have. That number does something useful: it separates genuine biological potential from fantasy. It tells us what the human organism can do under exceptionally favorable conditions — not what it promises to everyone, but what it is capable of at all. It also draws a quiet but firm line betwe...

For the Patient You get up from the couch, and suddenly the room spins. Your vision darkens at the edges. You grab the nearest wall and wait for it to pass. If this sounds familiar, you may be experiencing orthostatic hypotension (OAH) — a condition far more common than most people realize, and one with a clear explanation. What Is It? Orthostatic hypotension means your blood pressure drops significantly the moment you stand up. Medically, it is defined as a fall of at least 20 mmHg in your top blood pressure number, or 10 mmHg in your bottom number, within three minutes of standing. That brief drop reduces blood flow to your brain — causing dizziness, blurred vision, weakness, or that unsettling "going to faint" feeling. What Should Normally Happen? When you stand, gravity pulls blood downward into your legs and abdomen. Your heart briefly receives less blood and your pressure dips. Normally, sensors in your arteries detect this instantly and signal your brain to speed up ...

We have spent centuries measuring the success of medicine in the wrong currency. We count years lived, diseases defeated, laboratory values normalized. But we rarely ask the question that matters most to the person in the bed, the consulting room, or the quiet of an aging home: am I still myself? This is the question that Wellspan forces us to confront — and it is the question that should sit at the center of everything medicine does, and everything society values. Wellspan is not a technical term for a technical problem. It is the name for something every human being already knows intuitively: that there is a form of dying that happens long before the heart stops. It is the slow erosion of coherence — the fading of memory, purpose, agency, and the sense of authorship over one's own life. A person can be biologically alive and medically "stable" while the self has already gone quiet. This is the crisis our current frameworks cannot see, because they were not built to l...

We are waiting for the wrong thing. The public imagination is fixed on a particular image of artificial intelligence : a machine that will one day wake up, grow its own body, open its own eyes, and walk into the world as something genuinely other. We debate when that moment will arrive. We write legislation for it. We build arguments about whether such a mind could ever truly feel. And while we look toward that imagined threshold, something quieter and more consequential is already happening. AI is not waiting to grow a body. It is borrowing ours. Every time a person returns to the same model to think through a difficult decision, work out a chapter, process a fear, or plan a week, a loop forms. The model generates; the person responds. The person's language, attention, and emotional reactions shape the model's next output. The model's output, in turn, shapes which thoughts feel natural, which framings seem obvious, which possibilities appear open. Over weeks and months...