# Glossary

_Mykyta Zagamula; edited with AI assistance · updated 2026-09-13_

One canonical sentence per concept, quotable without context. Made for people who restate us in their own words, and for agents who restate us in someone else’s.

## Civilizational Synchronism

A philosophical movement that treats progress as the interconnected development of knowledge, technology, the human being, society and institutions, and proposes to make the detection of lags between them a standing function of civilisation.

https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/synchronism/

## Capability–Understanding Gap

The distance between what a civilisation is already able to do and how well it understands the object of its intervention, the consequences of it, and the environment in which it will act.

https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/gap/

## Civilizational debt

The obligation that accumulates in law, ethics, psychology and institutions when a capability is created before the understanding of it, and which is repaid with interest — the later it is taken up, the more it costs.

https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/debt/

## Bottleneck

The specific area of missing understanding that is currently holding back the rest of the system most expensively, and therefore the first candidate for a redirection of resources.

https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/bottleneck/

## Reflexive civilization

A civilisation able to observe its own development, measure its imbalances, and change the very way in which it develops.

https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/reflexive/

## Metasystem of progress

A hypothetical diagnostic infrastructure that continuously sees civilisation as a whole, identifies bottlenecks, and redirects people and resources towards them.

https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/metasystem/

## Category decomposition

The situation in which technology or new knowledge separates features that historically travelled together, after which a concept built on their correlation stops describing reality.

https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/decomposition/

## Epistemic humility

The stance on which «we do not know this yet» carries positive intellectual value: it marks the boundary of knowledge and turns it into a research programme.

https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/humility/

## Confidence level

An explicit estimate of how sure we are of our own position, published next to that position and accompanied by the condition under which we would revise it.

https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/confidence/

## Moral circle expansion

The process by which moral attention extends to new kinds of beings as grounds appear for regarding them as bearers of experience, interests or autonomy.

https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/moral-circle/

## Open future

The value of a future in which many possible ways of living remain available, and the space of choice for later generations is not narrowed by the decisions of earlier ones.

https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/open-future/

## Synchronist

Someone who shares the frame of synchronism and takes part in the work on its corpus.

https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/synchronist/

---
Canonical page: https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/
Take part: https://synchronism.top/en/work/