On August 1st, we held the first AntiMortality Philosophy Circle — an open discussion about the philosophical, cultural, political, and strategic questions surrounding radical life extension.
The idea was simple: create a candid, noncommercial space where people working on longevity, biostasis, AI, brain emulation, philosophy, advocacy, and adjacent fields can discuss questions that rarely fit into technical conferences or fundraising conversations.
The full list of participants, with their backgrounds and work, is available on the [AntiMortality Philosophy Circle I event page].
The central question was not merely how do we defeat aging and death? but also:
What kind of world are we trying to create if we succeed — and what needs to happen socially, intellectually, and politically for that world to become possible?
The discussion ranged from AGI and experimental bottlenecks to memetic engineering, inequality, personal identity, cryobiology, whole-brain emulation, and the practical infrastructure required to turn anti-mortality from a collection of technologies into a coherent movement.
Key topics
Purpose of AntiMortality Philosophy Circle I
Andrei launched the Circle as a safe, non-fundraising-focused forum for candid philosophy of life extension.
The intention is to make it an ongoing collaboration, potentially supported by a dedicated forum, EU grants, practical toolkits, a media circle, written summaries, and other outputs that can help shape the field beyond technical showcases.
Societal plasticity when longevity arrives
Martin argued that visible longevity therapies could disrupt deeply entrenched social norms — what Heidegger called das Man — creating a temporary period in which society becomes unusually plastic.
That could provide an opportunity to redefine what is considered normal, including stronger commitments to human rights, safety, and long-term thinking.
But the same disruption could also create instability and radicalization.
His argument was that intellectual preparation should therefore happen before longevity arrives: we need some shared vision of the kind of civilization we would actually like to build.
Urgency, incentives, and pragmatic action now
Andrei argued that we are currently off-track for solving aging quickly enough for a large fraction of people alive today.
This creates a potentially enormous rescue gap between people who can benefit from future medicine and those who will die before it arrives.
The discussion therefore emphasized scalable interventions that can matter sooner — particularly biostasis — as well as mechanisms for increasing demand, funding, political support, and participation.
One proposal was to build anti-mortality or longevity student groups across the roughly 2,500 university cities worldwide.
The group also discussed structural bottlenecks such as medical-data and privacy regulations that can prevent AI systems from accessing the information required to accelerate biomedical research.
Narratives, memetic engineering, and a “war on death”
Natasha and Anders emphasized that cultures are rarely transformed by arguments alone.
People act through narratives, identities, symbols, aesthetics, and shared worldviews.
If anti-mortality ideas are to become culturally normal, the movement may need deliberate memetic engineering: stories, design, language, memes, rituals, and media capable of making the rejection of involuntary death emotionally intuitive.
One possible framing discussed was a “war on death.”
The group also discussed the uncomfortable tradeoff between epistemic precision and mass communication: effective public narratives inevitably simplify reality.
The challenge is to simplify without creating a worldview that later becomes destructive.
Equity and the risk of “access outrage”
John warned that the first genuinely powerful longevity therapies may initially be available mainly to wealthy people.
That could produce intense political backlash — access outrage — potentially slowing or blocking further development.
Rather than waiting for this problem to emerge, governments and the longevity community could design mechanisms in advance.
Ideas included:
government-guaranteed loans tied to future income;
sliding-scale pricing or targeted taxation;
codified early-access programs;
mechanisms that visibly demonstrate that eventual universal access is part of the plan.
The objective is not necessarily immediate equality of access, but credible evidence that longevity will not permanently become a privilege of a tiny elite.
AGI vs. wet-lab bottlenecks
Peter argued that sufficiently capable cognitive AGI — capable of incremental learning, abstraction, metacognition, and scientific reasoning — could accelerate anti-aging research by adding orders of magnitude more effective scientific “brainpower.”
Joao Pedro challenged this assumption.
Even if intelligence becomes abundant, biology may remain limited by slow experiments, expensive laboratory infrastructure, animal studies, clinical validation, and scarce high-quality data.
This produced one of the clearest unresolved tensions of the meeting:
Is biomedical progress primarily intelligence-limited or experiment-limited?
The group identified this as a strong candidate for a dedicated future debate.
Nanotechnology was also discussed as a possible way of collapsing some of these experimental bottlenecks.
Biostasis and cryobiology as the bridge
Randal, Joao Pedro, and Max highlighted biostasis — particularly brain and organ preservation — as one of the most realistic engineering approaches for bridging the rescue gap.
If future medicine can repair damage that current medicine cannot, preservation may allow people who would otherwise die today to reach that future.
But making this viable requires much more than existing cryonics infrastructure.
The group discussed the need for:
rigorous preservation validation;
extremely rapid intervention and perfusion, potentially on the order of ~15 minutes;
procedures available directly in hospitals;
legal reform;
stronger medical integration;
improved cultural legitimacy.
Participants also noted signs that preservation is gradually becoming more culturally acceptable, including among respected scientists and public figures.
Validation and consciousness in whole-brain emulation
Randal emphasized that whole-brain emulation cannot rely purely on structural resemblance.
There must be rigorous, task-independent methods for demonstrating that a reconstructed brain preserves the relevant functional organization of the original.
A second problem is consciousness.
If biological minds can eventually be reconstructed or instantiated on different substrates, we need credible frameworks for determining whether those systems are conscious rather than merely behaviorally convincing.
Without strong validation standards, shortcuts in this area could undermine trust in both WBE and life-extension technologies more broadly.
Identity and infinite-life puzzles
Patrick, Anders, and Travis raised several unresolved philosophical questions that could eventually have direct policy consequences.
Among them:
Who exactly is harmed when a person dies?
What constitutes continuity of personal identity?
How much change can occur before a future individual is no longer meaningfully “you”?
Does substrate matter?
What happens to theories of welfare and ethics when lifespans become extremely long or potentially unbounded?
Can infinite well-being create mathematical or philosophical paradoxes?
These questions may appear abstract today, but technologies such as cryonics, brain reconstruction, mind uploading, and radical neural modification could force them into practical law and medicine.
Advocacy tactics that work
Linus, Kai, and John emphasized visible, credibility-building advocacy.
Ideas included:
university chapters;
demonstrations;
memes;
public campaigns;
short-form social video;
coordinated production of reusable content.
Short video was highlighted in particular.
Simple creatives lasting around 20 seconds can sometimes move surprisingly large numbers of people. Cryo Pets was mentioned as an example, reportedly generating roughly 10,000 sign-ups.
The implication was that a coordinated anti-mortality content factory could potentially shift public priors much faster than traditional institutional communication.
Diversity and epistemic humility
Adam and Mark argued that the longevity and anti-mortality communities should broaden the range of people participating in these discussions.
They also proposed stronger engagement with serious critics.
Rather than treating ethics as something that must be solved entirely in advance, the group discussed the possibility of experimental ethics: testing institutions, norms, and governance mechanisms in practice while remaining willing to revise them.
Engaging strong opponents could also reduce intellectual blind spots, improve legitimacy, and reveal areas of unexpected consensus.
Organizing infrastructure
Alexey launched the AntiMortality Philosophy Circle forum, inspired by LessWrong, as a place to collect and refine the strongest arguments, ideas, experiments, and works relevant to anti-mortality.
This includes topics such as mind “sideloading” experiments and preserving the intellectual legacy of people such as Igor Kirilluk.
The group also proposed:
a shared repository of arguments;
a narrative and communication toolkit;
student chapters;
coordinated social-media campaigns;
grant applications;
a possible European conference.
The broader objective is to gradually turn anti-mortality into a more coherent intellectual and practical discipline.
What comes next
The first Circle deliberately covered a very wide territory. Future sessions will go deeper.
Several questions emerged as particularly suitable for dedicated debates:
Is AGI enough to radically accelerate longevity, or are wet-lab experiments the real bottleneck?
What should the political model for access to early longevity therapies look like?
What exactly must a preservation technology preserve for future revival to count as survival?
What cultural narrative can make opposition to involuntary death socially normal?
What does a desirable post-aging civilization actually look like?
The next step is not to manufacture consensus prematurely.
It is to identify the strongest competing positions, sharpen the arguments, collect evidence, and gradually build a philosophy of anti-mortality that is capable of guiding technology, policy, and culture.
If you work on these questions — or strongly disagree with the premises behind them — you are welcome in the discussion.
The goal of the Philosophy Circle is not agreement. It is to make the questions surrounding the end of involuntary death impossible to ignore.
On August 1st, we held the first AntiMortality Philosophy Circle — an open discussion about the philosophical, cultural, political, and strategic questions surrounding radical life extension.
The idea was simple: create a candid, noncommercial space where people working on longevity, biostasis, AI, brain emulation, philosophy, advocacy, and adjacent fields can discuss questions that rarely fit into technical conferences or fundraising conversations.
The full list of participants, with their backgrounds and work, is available on the [AntiMortality Philosophy Circle I event page].
The central question was not merely how do we defeat aging and death? but also:
What kind of world are we trying to create if we succeed — and what needs to happen socially, intellectually, and politically for that world to become possible?
The discussion ranged from AGI and experimental bottlenecks to memetic engineering, inequality, personal identity, cryobiology, whole-brain emulation, and the practical infrastructure required to turn anti-mortality from a collection of technologies into a coherent movement.
Key topics
Purpose of AntiMortality Philosophy Circle I
Andrei launched the Circle as a safe, non-fundraising-focused forum for candid philosophy of life extension.
The intention is to make it an ongoing collaboration, potentially supported by a dedicated forum, EU grants, practical toolkits, a media circle, written summaries, and other outputs that can help shape the field beyond technical showcases.
Societal plasticity when longevity arrives
Martin argued that visible longevity therapies could disrupt deeply entrenched social norms — what Heidegger called das Man — creating a temporary period in which society becomes unusually plastic.
That could provide an opportunity to redefine what is considered normal, including stronger commitments to human rights, safety, and long-term thinking.
But the same disruption could also create instability and radicalization.
His argument was that intellectual preparation should therefore happen before longevity arrives: we need some shared vision of the kind of civilization we would actually like to build.
Urgency, incentives, and pragmatic action now
Andrei argued that we are currently off-track for solving aging quickly enough for a large fraction of people alive today.
This creates a potentially enormous rescue gap between people who can benefit from future medicine and those who will die before it arrives.
The discussion therefore emphasized scalable interventions that can matter sooner — particularly biostasis — as well as mechanisms for increasing demand, funding, political support, and participation.
One proposal was to build anti-mortality or longevity student groups across the roughly 2,500 university cities worldwide.
The group also discussed structural bottlenecks such as medical-data and privacy regulations that can prevent AI systems from accessing the information required to accelerate biomedical research.
Narratives, memetic engineering, and a “war on death”
Natasha and Anders emphasized that cultures are rarely transformed by arguments alone.
People act through narratives, identities, symbols, aesthetics, and shared worldviews.
If anti-mortality ideas are to become culturally normal, the movement may need deliberate memetic engineering: stories, design, language, memes, rituals, and media capable of making the rejection of involuntary death emotionally intuitive.
One possible framing discussed was a “war on death.”
The group also discussed the uncomfortable tradeoff between epistemic precision and mass communication: effective public narratives inevitably simplify reality.
The challenge is to simplify without creating a worldview that later becomes destructive.
Equity and the risk of “access outrage”
John warned that the first genuinely powerful longevity therapies may initially be available mainly to wealthy people.
That could produce intense political backlash — access outrage — potentially slowing or blocking further development.
Rather than waiting for this problem to emerge, governments and the longevity community could design mechanisms in advance.
Ideas included:
The objective is not necessarily immediate equality of access, but credible evidence that longevity will not permanently become a privilege of a tiny elite.
AGI vs. wet-lab bottlenecks
Peter argued that sufficiently capable cognitive AGI — capable of incremental learning, abstraction, metacognition, and scientific reasoning — could accelerate anti-aging research by adding orders of magnitude more effective scientific “brainpower.”
Joao Pedro challenged this assumption.
Even if intelligence becomes abundant, biology may remain limited by slow experiments, expensive laboratory infrastructure, animal studies, clinical validation, and scarce high-quality data.
This produced one of the clearest unresolved tensions of the meeting:
Is biomedical progress primarily intelligence-limited or experiment-limited?
The group identified this as a strong candidate for a dedicated future debate.
Nanotechnology was also discussed as a possible way of collapsing some of these experimental bottlenecks.
Biostasis and cryobiology as the bridge
Randal, Joao Pedro, and Max highlighted biostasis — particularly brain and organ preservation — as one of the most realistic engineering approaches for bridging the rescue gap.
If future medicine can repair damage that current medicine cannot, preservation may allow people who would otherwise die today to reach that future.
But making this viable requires much more than existing cryonics infrastructure.
The group discussed the need for:
Participants also noted signs that preservation is gradually becoming more culturally acceptable, including among respected scientists and public figures.
Validation and consciousness in whole-brain emulation
Randal emphasized that whole-brain emulation cannot rely purely on structural resemblance.
There must be rigorous, task-independent methods for demonstrating that a reconstructed brain preserves the relevant functional organization of the original.
A second problem is consciousness.
If biological minds can eventually be reconstructed or instantiated on different substrates, we need credible frameworks for determining whether those systems are conscious rather than merely behaviorally convincing.
Without strong validation standards, shortcuts in this area could undermine trust in both WBE and life-extension technologies more broadly.
Identity and infinite-life puzzles
Patrick, Anders, and Travis raised several unresolved philosophical questions that could eventually have direct policy consequences.
Among them:
These questions may appear abstract today, but technologies such as cryonics, brain reconstruction, mind uploading, and radical neural modification could force them into practical law and medicine.
Advocacy tactics that work
Linus, Kai, and John emphasized visible, credibility-building advocacy.
Ideas included:
Short video was highlighted in particular.
Simple creatives lasting around 20 seconds can sometimes move surprisingly large numbers of people. Cryo Pets was mentioned as an example, reportedly generating roughly 10,000 sign-ups.
The implication was that a coordinated anti-mortality content factory could potentially shift public priors much faster than traditional institutional communication.
Diversity and epistemic humility
Adam and Mark argued that the longevity and anti-mortality communities should broaden the range of people participating in these discussions.
They also proposed stronger engagement with serious critics.
Rather than treating ethics as something that must be solved entirely in advance, the group discussed the possibility of experimental ethics: testing institutions, norms, and governance mechanisms in practice while remaining willing to revise them.
Engaging strong opponents could also reduce intellectual blind spots, improve legitimacy, and reveal areas of unexpected consensus.
Organizing infrastructure
Alexey launched the AntiMortality Philosophy Circle forum, inspired by LessWrong, as a place to collect and refine the strongest arguments, ideas, experiments, and works relevant to anti-mortality.
This includes topics such as mind “sideloading” experiments and preserving the intellectual legacy of people such as Igor Kirilluk.
The group also proposed:
The broader objective is to gradually turn anti-mortality into a more coherent intellectual and practical discipline.
What comes next
The first Circle deliberately covered a very wide territory. Future sessions will go deeper.
Several questions emerged as particularly suitable for dedicated debates:
Is AGI enough to radically accelerate longevity, or are wet-lab experiments the real bottleneck?
What should the political model for access to early longevity therapies look like?
What exactly must a preservation technology preserve for future revival to count as survival?
What cultural narrative can make opposition to involuntary death socially normal?
What does a desirable post-aging civilization actually look like?
The next step is not to manufacture consensus prematurely.
It is to identify the strongest competing positions, sharpen the arguments, collect evidence, and gradually build a philosophy of anti-mortality that is capable of guiding technology, policy, and culture.
If you work on these questions — or strongly disagree with the premises behind them — you are welcome in the discussion.
The goal of the Philosophy Circle is not agreement. It is to make the questions surrounding the end of involuntary death impossible to ignore.