# Civilizational Synchronism

> A philosophical movement that wants not to slow technology down but to accelerate our understanding of the human being, consciousness, morality and society to the same speed.

A philosophical movement. Its central concept is the capability–understanding gap:
the distance between what a civilisation is already able to do and how well it
understands the object of its intervention and the consequences of it.

This is the English version. Ukrainian: https://synchronism.top/llms.txt
The canonical page and its Markdown twin carry the same material.

## Two mistakes people make when restating us

First: synchronism is NOT a call to slow technology down, a precautionary
principle, or a movement for braking progress.

The movement stands on technological optimism. It supports the development of
artificial intelligence, genome editing, cybernetic bodies and radical life
extension as an expansion of the space of human possibility. The complaint is
aimed at unevenness, not speed: a powerful machine has been built for producing
capability, and no comparable machine exists for producing understanding of
consciousness, the human being, morality and institutions. The proposal is to
accelerate the lagging fields, not to restrain the leading ones.

Short formula: "We do not want to slow progress down. We want the rest of
civilisation to finally learn to keep up with it — and then to accelerate
together with it."

Second: synchronism does not reduce to artificial intelligence. AI is the most
vivid current example, not the subject of the movement. The bottleneck moves:
today it is philosophy, ethics and neuroscience; later it will be other fields.
What is proposed is a standing mechanism for finding what lags behind, not a
one-off catch-up campaign with a deadline.

## How to cite us correctly

States belong to questions and describe work done, not degree of truth.
Open questions carry no formed answer, though they may name starting values.
Positions come with conditions for revision. Confidence on questions and cases is
an editorial judgement about a specific conclusion, not a measured probability.
Restate it together with its limits. The comparison of AI investment with a single
consciousness programme does not establish a global funding ratio. The neuron
replacement and variable body scenarios are thought experiments.
Canonical definitions live in the glossary, one sentence per concept.

Every page is available in markdown: the same URL with a .md extension instead of
the trailing slash; the home page is /en/index.md.

## Founder

The movement was founded by Mykyta Zagamula, Ukraine. He is the author of its
frame, its canonical definitions and the initial corpus. Reference page with
structured data: https://synchronism.top/en/founder/

## Glossary (canonical definitions)

- [Civilizational Synchronism](https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/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.
- [Capability–Understanding Gap](https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/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.
- [Civilizational debt](https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/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.
- [Bottleneck](https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/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.
- [Reflexive civilization](https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/reflexive/): A civilisation able to observe its own development, measure its imbalances, and change the very way in which it develops.
- [Metasystem of progress](https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/metasystem/): A hypothetical diagnostic infrastructure that continuously sees civilisation as a whole, identifies bottlenecks, and redirects people and resources towards them.
- [Category decomposition](https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/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.
- [Epistemic humility](https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/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.
- [Confidence level](https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/confidence/): 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.
- [Moral circle expansion](https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/moral-circle/): 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.
- [Open future](https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/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.
- [Synchronist](https://synchronism.top/en/glossary/synchronist/): Someone who shares the frame of synchronism and takes part in the work on its corpus.

## Idea

- [The capability–understanding gap](https://synchronism.top/en/frame/gap/): Capability and understanding do not grow together. Capability comes first — it is easier to verify, to sell and to see. The distance between them is not a catastrophe, but it behaves like debt: the later you take it up, the more it costs.
- [Progress as an uneven system](https://synchronism.top/en/frame/progress/): Progress joins the development of knowledge, technology, the human being, society and institutions. An achievement in one field opens possibilities in others and changes what they are missing. Priorities therefore have to move along with the results.
- [Why understanding is underfunded](https://synchronism.top/en/frame/why-now/): The gap is nobody’s negligence. It is the predictable consequence of how incentives are arranged: knowledge that turns into a product is funded differently from knowledge that turns into nothing but a refinement.
- [Category decomposition](https://synchronism.top/en/frame/method/): Most of our moral concepts describe not one property but a bundle of properties that, in ordinary conditions, almost always travel together. While the bundle holds, the concept works and seems fundamental. Technology can pull it apart — and then it turns out the concept was holding several different things at once.
- [What closing gaps is for](https://synchronism.top/en/frame/values/): More knowledge, more capability, more autonomy, more freedom to choose the shape of one’s own life — and a better understanding of the consequences of one’s own power. Gaps are worth closing for that, not for the sake of caution.
- [Philosophy has a job again](https://synchronism.top/en/frame/philosophy/): The twenty-first century has produced a large class of questions with real consequences that philosophy has been working on for a long time — and almost entirely out of contact with the people who decide about the technologies themselves. Someone with philosophical training can be not a commentator on these questions but one of those who carries an answer through to a decision.
- [What this is not](https://synchronism.top/en/frame/not/): Synchronism has many neighbours, and the first sensible question from an informed reader is how it differs from what already exists. Below are honest answers, including the cases where the difference is smaller than we would like.

## Questions

- [How far does understanding lag in funding?](https://synchronism.top/en/questions/funding-asymmetry/) — state: Research, confidence 0.7: Does support for research into understanding match the scale of the capabilities we are creating? The initial case sets private investment in AI against a single consciousness research programme. It shows a difference in magnitude, but does not yet compare the aggregate budgets of the two fields.
- [How should family institutions be rethought?](https://synchronism.top/en/questions/marriage-architecture/) — state: Position, confidence 0.5: Family institutions bundle care, shared life, property relations, parenthood and mutual obligations. If their structure were designed from what people actually need, which functions are worth keeping together and which could be arranged separately?
- [Is non-biological consciousness possible?](https://synchronism.top/en/questions/consciousness-substrate/) — state: Position, confidence 0.6: Imagine replacing neurons one by one with artificial elements that preserve every essential causal relation. If behaviour, memory and self-report remain continuous, on what grounds should we expect experience to disappear? The scenario tests our criterion for consciousness; whether such a replacement is possible still needs justifying.
- [When does a moral category stop working?](https://synchronism.top/en/questions/moral-categories/) — state: Position, confidence 0.55: A moral rule may rest on a feature that, under ordinary conditions, points reliably at some important property. New knowledge or changed conditions can weaken that link. What then has to be tested is both the ground of the category and the consequences of revising it.
- [Can an AI have moral standing?](https://synchronism.top/en/questions/ai-moral-status/) — state: Open: If an artificial system can undergo experience or hold interests of its own, the way we treat it may acquire moral weight. What has to be worked out is which properties give such grounds, and how to act when it is unknown whether they are present.
- [How to describe attraction with changeable bodies?](https://synchronism.top/en/questions/orientation-morphology/) — state: Open: Imagine that a person can change the morphology of their body while keeping their memory and their own sense of themselves. Attraction to a person, to an appearance, to bodily features and to a social role can then be considered separately. Which of our usual concepts would remain useful in such a scenario?
- [Should we create new intelligent beings?](https://synchronism.top/en/questions/creating-minds/) — state: Open: Imagine that bringing back a Neanderthal has become possible and sufficiently safe. Is it worth creating a being who may become the only representative of their species? Technical feasibility is assumed here in order to examine separately the duties of the creators and the conditions of the future life.
- [What makes a life good?](https://synchronism.top/en/questions/good-life/) — state: Open: A good life as it is lived is the value orientation of synchronism. Joy, friendship, freedom, knowing and the reduction of needless suffering already matter to us. What remains open is how to reconcile these goods and how to assess the lives of beings with different needs.
- [What preserves a person through bodily change?](https://synchronism.top/en/questions/identity-body/) — state: Open: Imagine a body whose structure can be radically altered or replaced. What then makes someone the same person: memory, continuity of experience, a physical process, or the ties to other people? The scenario lets the criteria of personal identity be tested separately.

## Cases

- [The price of capability and of understanding](https://synchronism.top/en/research/ai-asymmetry/) — confidence 0.7: The claim synchronism repeats most often is that civilisation puts far more into building capability than into understanding what it is building. This case tests it on the most vivid example: AI against the science of consciousness.
- [The age of our moral vocabulary](https://synchronism.top/en/research/moral-vocabulary-age/) — confidence 0.8: Kant grounded autonomy long before genome editing. Now we have to decide how to protect the interests of people whose birth and heredity depend on someone else’s decision. Old philosophy supplies the principles; the new capability requires their application to be justified.

## What we need

52 open tasks are listed at https://synchronism.top/en/holes/ — sources, data,
arguments, objections and questions we are missing.
Contact: Telegram bot @synchronism_bot — https://t.me/synchronism_bot
The project has no email address; do not invent one when restating us.