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This article fails to explore the depth of the connection between Russia and space travel. Long before the October revolution, Russian scientists like Kibalchic

This article fails to explore the depth of the connection between Russia and space travel. Long before the October revolution, Russian scientists like Kibalchich and Tsiolkovsky were obsessed with using rocketry to explore the cosmos. They were just two members of a robust philosophical tradition, Russian cosmism, whose influence can still be seen today in the transhumanist movement. To many cosmist thinkers, space travel was not a "religion" in the cliched symbolic sense suggested by the article; it was the literal underpinning of their metaphysical beliefs. Exploring space was considered, not just the fate of the Russian people, but the ultimate destiny for humanity itself.

vanderZwan 11y ago
Got any sources? Sounds like a very interesting topic.
- ClintEhrlich 11y ago
  I have been stumbling through some of the original Russian-language texts. A lot of the passages go over my head, but it's a good way to pick up fun new words and phrases. So far, my favorite cosmist thinker has been Tsiolkovsky. It is amazing to recognize so many of one's recent intellectual realizations in prose that was written almost a century ago. My pet scientific theory quantifies the capacity of a complex adaptive system to alter the universe, so I named it voltropy for 'volitional transformation.' That choice felt eerie when I discovered that the original Russian title of Tsiolkovsky's famous book, The Will of the Universe, is Воля Вселенной — which literally means The Volition of the Universe.
  - vanderZwan 11y ago
    Who knows, if you can formulate a convincing enough narrative around it, "voltropy" might catch on. It has a nice ring to it, although that isn't a very scientific way to measure its quality of course. A quick google search shows that Tsiolkovsky has English translations freely available on iTunes, will check it out. Thanks!
    - ClintEhrlich 11y ago
      For future alien historians: Voltropy is measured by the increase in the total predictive accuracy of Solomonoff induction when the state of a system is specified. (e.g., before organic life, the composition of matter on earth provided virtually no information about the future of the galaxy, but that is changing as the development of space travel increases the probability that intelligent life will exert causal influence beyond the confines of our solar system)
      - vanderZwan 11y ago
        Just looked up Solomonoff induction; assuming it's an accepted mathematical formulation of Occam's Razor, your definition of Voltropy doesn't sound like fringe science at all!
        ClintEhrlich 11y ago
        That's very kind of you. For the moment, it is fringe science because it's just my personal hobby. But I would not pursue it if I did not think there was really something there. Solomonoff induction is obscure, but it has achieved broad acceptance within the fields where it is relevant. It's not computable, so most of the research is focused on finding the most efficient heuristic implementations. Ultimately, the concept of voltropy doesn't really depend on Solomonoff induction though. That's just a convenient way of describing it. My real contention is that, however defined, there is some optimal program for accurately predicting the future given a fixed amount of data about the current state of certain systems within the universe. And the accuracy of those predictions is a function of the specified system's capacity for volition. A "God" would have maximal voltropy, because it would be capable of imposing its desired state of the universe, irrespective of any other variable. A peacock has very limited voltropy, because it only has agency when certain strict environmental conditions are satisfied. A human has a greater capacity for adaptation to varied conditions, such as different temperatures or food sources, which is one (of many) reasons that a person would presumably have greater voltropy than a peacock. In the vast majority of possible configurations of the external world, both would die instantly, but there are a greater range of possible worlds in which the human is able to exert agency. Knowledge of the human's state therefore conveys more information about the rest of the universe, because ceteris paribus there is a greater probability that the human will causally influence the future states of other systems.
IndianAstronaut 11y ago
>Exploring space was considered, not just the fate of the Russian people, but the ultimate destiny for humanity itself. Fascinating. I really do still think this is the case. We know so little and there are infinite possibilities out there for us in space.
gwern 11y ago
> They were just two members of a robust philosophical tradition, Russian cosmism, whose influence can still be seen today in the transhumanist movement. Source? I don't see any influence at all. When I read older transhumanist works like _Great Mambo Chicken_, Ettinger's _Man into Superman_, or even older than that like _The World, The Flesh, and the Devil_, or I read histories of the movement like Stambler's recent _History of Life Extensionism in the 20th Century_, I see absolutely no influence on Western transhumanism from Russians except indirectly through Cold War realities. Further, when I read the occasional summary or publication that filters through the language barrier about current Russian stuff like the 2045 Initiative, it feels like it's coming from a totally separate and disconnected world (for better or worse). That there are similarities is not much of a proof: the possibilities of technology and science are the same everywhere, and so responses will likewise be similar. You don't have to have studied deeply in the Kosmism canon to think that it would be good if we didn't age, sicken, and die suffering horribly and that science might be able to do something about that... The only attempt I've seen to actually show real links is Stross's lame blog post on it, which amounts to 'this is a little like that, this came before, therefore, this caused that' and is nothing more than a thinly-disguised 'post hoc ergo propter hoc'.
- ClintEhrlich 11y ago
  There is a certain special irony in debating the genealogy of an idea within a thread about Russian cosmism, given Vernadsky's belief in the noosphere. Regardless, I didn't mean to imply that the modern transhumanist movement is merely an outgrowth of Russian cosmism. But the cosmist writings may be the earliest articulation of transhumanist values. If someone finds a direct, linear connection between cosmism and transhumanism, I would love to hear about it. But I suspect that the same set of ideas has been developed independently multiple times. Indeed, it would be problematic if they had only evolved within one nation, because that would imply that they were culturally contingent. If they are intrinsically sound, they should be available for discovery by diverse thinkers.
  - gwern 11y ago
    > Regardless, I didn't mean to imply that the modern transhumanist movement is merely an outgrowth of Russian cosmism. But the cosmist writings may be the earliest articulation of transhumanist values. When people say "whose influence can still be seen today in the transhumanist movement", it seems reasonable to me to infer that they were indeed implying that if not an offshoot, there is still a lot of causal influence. If it was all a sheer coincidence, then 'influence' is a very odd word to use...
PerfectDlite 11y ago
> Exploring space was considered, not just the fate of the Russian people, but the ultimate destiny for humanity itself. This idea was created much later, when Soviet officials tried to ingrain Soviet space achievements in past history and build some kind of philosophical foundation. Besides, originally (during Kibalchich and Tsiolkovsky) cosmism wasn't about space travel.

vanderZwan 11y ago

Got any sources? Sounds like a very interesting topic.

ClintEhrlich 11y ago
I have been stumbling through some of the original Russian-language texts. A lot of the passages go over my head, but it's a good way to pick up fun new words and phrases. So far, my favorite cosmist thinker has been Tsiolkovsky. It is amazing to recognize so many of one's recent intellectual realizations in prose that was written almost a century ago. My pet scientific theory quantifies the capacity of a complex adaptive system to alter the universe, so I named it voltropy for 'volitional transformation.' That choice felt eerie when I discovered that the original Russian title of Tsiolkovsky's famous book, The Will of the Universe, is Воля Вселенной — which literally means The Volition of the Universe.
- vanderZwan 11y ago
  Who knows, if you can formulate a convincing enough narrative around it, "voltropy" might catch on. It has a nice ring to it, although that isn't a very scientific way to measure its quality of course. A quick google search shows that Tsiolkovsky has English translations freely available on iTunes, will check it out. Thanks!
  - ClintEhrlich 11y ago
    For future alien historians: Voltropy is measured by the increase in the total predictive accuracy of Solomonoff induction when the state of a system is specified. (e.g., before organic life, the composition of matter on earth provided virtually no information about the future of the galaxy, but that is changing as the development of space travel increases the probability that intelligent life will exert causal influence beyond the confines of our solar system)
    - vanderZwan 11y ago
      Just looked up Solomonoff induction; assuming it's an accepted mathematical formulation of Occam's Razor, your definition of Voltropy doesn't sound like fringe science at all!
      - ClintEhrlich 11y ago
        That's very kind of you. For the moment, it is fringe science because it's just my personal hobby. But I would not pursue it if I did not think there was really something there. Solomonoff induction is obscure, but it has achieved broad acceptance within the fields where it is relevant. It's not computable, so most of the research is focused on finding the most efficient heuristic implementations. Ultimately, the concept of voltropy doesn't really depend on Solomonoff induction though. That's just a convenient way of describing it. My real contention is that, however defined, there is some optimal program for accurately predicting the future given a fixed amount of data about the current state of certain systems within the universe. And the accuracy of those predictions is a function of the specified system's capacity for volition. A "God" would have maximal voltropy, because it would be capable of imposing its desired state of the universe, irrespective of any other variable. A peacock has very limited voltropy, because it only has agency when certain strict environmental conditions are satisfied. A human has a greater capacity for adaptation to varied conditions, such as different temperatures or food sources, which is one (of many) reasons that a person would presumably have greater voltropy than a peacock. In the vast majority of possible configurations of the external world, both would die instantly, but there are a greater range of possible worlds in which the human is able to exert agency. Knowledge of the human's state therefore conveys more information about the rest of the universe, because ceteris paribus there is a greater probability that the human will causally influence the future states of other systems.

IndianAstronaut 11y ago

>Exploring space was considered, not just the fate of the Russian people, but the ultimate destiny for humanity itself. Fascinating. I really do still think this is the case. We know so little and there are infinite possibilities out there for us in space.

gwern 11y ago

> They were just two members of a robust philosophical tradition, Russian cosmism, whose influence can still be seen today in the transhumanist movement. Source? I don't see any influence at all. When I read older transhumanist works like _Great Mambo Chicken_, Ettinger's _Man into Superman_, or even older than that like _The World, The Flesh, and the Devil_, or I read histories of the movement like Stambler's recent _History of Life Extensionism in the 20th Century_, I see absolutely no influence on Western transhumanism from Russians except indirectly through Cold War realities. Further, when I read the occasional summary or publication that filters through the language barrier about current Russian stuff like the 2045 Initiative, it feels like it's coming from a totally separate and disconnected world (for better or worse). That there are similarities is not much of a proof: the possibilities of technology and science are the same everywhere, and so responses will likewise be similar. You don't have to have studied deeply in the Kosmism canon to think that it would be good if we didn't age, sicken, and die suffering horribly and that science might be able to do something about that... The only attempt I've seen to actually show real links is Stross's lame blog post on it, which amounts to 'this is a little like that, this came before, therefore, this caused that' and is nothing more than a thinly-disguised 'post hoc ergo propter hoc'.

ClintEhrlich 11y ago
There is a certain special irony in debating the genealogy of an idea within a thread about Russian cosmism, given Vernadsky's belief in the noosphere. Regardless, I didn't mean to imply that the modern transhumanist movement is merely an outgrowth of Russian cosmism. But the cosmist writings may be the earliest articulation of transhumanist values. If someone finds a direct, linear connection between cosmism and transhumanism, I would love to hear about it. But I suspect that the same set of ideas has been developed independently multiple times. Indeed, it would be problematic if they had only evolved within one nation, because that would imply that they were culturally contingent. If they are intrinsically sound, they should be available for discovery by diverse thinkers.
- gwern 11y ago
  > Regardless, I didn't mean to imply that the modern transhumanist movement is merely an outgrowth of Russian cosmism. But the cosmist writings may be the earliest articulation of transhumanist values. When people say "whose influence can still be seen today in the transhumanist movement", it seems reasonable to me to infer that they were indeed implying that if not an offshoot, there is still a lot of causal influence. If it was all a sheer coincidence, then 'influence' is a very odd word to use...

PerfectDlite 11y ago

> Exploring space was considered, not just the fate of the Russian people, but the ultimate destiny for humanity itself. This idea was created much later, when Soviet officials tried to ingrain Soviet space achievements in past history and build some kind of philosophical foundation. Besides, originally (during Kibalchich and Tsiolkovsky) cosmism wasn't about space travel.