The first issue of 2026 is devoted to the place and role of the human being in the digital world. At first glance, this topic may appear excessively broad. Yet this impression is misleading, since digital technologies already permeate education, science, healthcare, the arts, manufacturing, the armed forces, the defence industry, agriculture, governance, and communications – in effect, virtually every sphere of social life. They have also become unavoidable companions of everyday private life and an integral part of each individual’s personal environment. It is precisely this breadth of application that provides both the principal rationale and the methodological basis for a systematic investigation of the issue selected as the theme of this volume.
The now ubiquitous use of rapidly evolving digital technologies and artificial intelligence systems requires the simultaneous and careful examination of the various dimensions of these new modes of existence, as well as an analysis of the sociocultural consequences they have produced—particularly the adverse effects that are becoming increasingly evident in everyday life.

A central insight of self-organization theory is that the future is not singular or predetermined. In nonlinear dynamics, complex systems may be said to “choose” among alternative futures at bifurcation points—moments when an existing trajectory loses stability and new paths of development become possible. Religious and philosophical traditions have long offered their own visions of humanity’s future; today, science is playing an increasingly prominent role in this debate. Its role is twofold. On the one hand, science describes and interprets the present state of the world. On the other, it can help humanity overcome obstacles to future development, provided that those obstacles are properly recognized and understood. From this perspective, the article considers the long-term prospects of humankind. Humanity now appears to face a fundamental choice between outward-oriented and inward-oriented models of development. At the same time, it has encountered a major barrier on its path into the future. Whether this barrier can be overcome—and, if so, when and by what means—is therefore a question of exceptional importance. Merely engaging with these issues has far-reaching implications for our worldview, as well as for strategic planning and for our understanding of the future development of society, the individual, and scientific knowledge. In recent years, a substantial body of research has emerged on the systemic analysis of global catastrophes. Yet the question of how humanity chooses among alternative futures—the central concern of this article—may be even more consequential. History also reveals the deceptive nature of bifurcation points. As we approach them, we can foresee only in the broadest terms whether the new reality into which we are moving will prove desirable or destructive, what price will have to be paid for the choices made, and which factors will ultimately become decisive. Because ours is a technological civilization, it is often equally difficult to anticipate what technical means will be available for addressing emerging challenges. The development and application of artificial intelligence and genome-editing technologies provide especially revealing examples. Before a bifurcation point is reached, it is essential to identify the questions whose answers will matter most in the reality that follows. This article is devoted to precisely those questions. Experienced teachers often note that grappling with difficult problems is valuable for students even when they are unable to arrive at a solution.

The article examines the current challenges involved in the emergence of a new civilization amid a global crisis that is ecological, anthropological, and social in nature. The authors argue that a new civilization cannot be borrowed from elsewhere or artificially constructed outside the continuity of historical development. Rather, it must emerge from within the framework of the preceding civilization, preserving and reinterpreting cultural heritage, the fundamental meanings of human existence, and the system of basic values. The article identifies the factors that sustain the stability of complex dynamic systems, particularly the biosphere, whose preservation is a necessary condition for maintaining an environment suitable for human habitation. The authors substantiate the need to move beyond an anthropocentric and consumer-oriented model of development toward an ecologically secure path. Such a transition requires aligning socio-economic processes with the laws of biospheric evolution, transforming patterns of production and consumption, reducing anthropogenic pressure, and introducing nature-inspired technologies. Special attention is paid to the co-evolutionary approach as a methodological foundation for the transition to a noospheric civilization. A noospheric civilization is understood as a form of development in which reason is directed toward harmonizing the conditions of coexistence among human beings, society, nature, and the technosphere on the basis of a philosophy of universal human responsibility. Co-evolution is interpreted not only as the interaction between society and nature, but also as a broader principle for coordinating the relations among human beings, the biosphere, social life, interstate and intercivilizational relations, and the human-made technosphere. In this context, the co-evolutionary approach also addresses issues of social justice, the protection of human dignity, access to the basic conditions of human development, and responsible engagement with digital platforms, artificial intelligence, and autonomous agent systems. The article concludes that, at the present stage, evolutionary theory is being further developed through the strategy of coevolution, which establishes the ecological, social, and technological principles governing human activity that are necessary to overcome the global crisis and facilitate the transition to a new civilization.

The article proposes a conceptual reconstruction of synthetic data autophagy as a systemic ecological limit to the development of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). The analysis begins with two interrelated problems: the finite availability of high-quality human-generated data and the increasing contamination of training corpora by texts, images, and other artefacts produced by generative models themselves. It is argued that recursive training on synthetic outputs results not only in a measurable decline in model performance but also in a qualitative deterioration of representational capacity. This deterioration is evident in the disappearance of rare semantic features, the contraction of data distributions, the homogenisation of outputs, and a reduced capacity to generate novel or non-trivial content. The article distinguishes three dimensions of the ecological limits confronting GenAI. The first is a resource limit arising from the scarcity of sufficiently diverse and reliable human-generated data. The second is a representational limit, manifested in the progressive loss of rare elements within the data distribution. The third is an evolutionary limit, expressed in the disruption of model scaling laws associated with increasing parameter counts. The article demonstrates that synthetic data do not constitute a neutral extension of the training environment, since they reproduce and amplify the biases, errors, and limitations of previous generations of models. Synthetic data autophagy is therefore interpreted as a form of epistemic closure in which an artificial system increasingly reproduces not the external world but its own statistical traces. From a philosophical perspective, autophagy is examined as a symptom of the exhaustion of the self-training paradigm and as a basis for challenging the metaphor of the autonomous evolution of GenAI. The author considers several strategies for preserving the openness of training environments, including active data curation, grounding in interactive environments, and the co-evolution of human and artificial intelligence. The article concludes by proposing an epistemic ecology of GenAI as a field concerned with the conditions necessary for the sustainable coexistence of human and artificial cognitive systems.

The article investigates whether contemporary large language models instantiate processes that are functionally equivalent to thinking and, if they do not, where exactly the gap between machine and biological intelligence lies. Its central claim is that consciousness is neither an ontologically necessary condition for thought nor an epistemologically sufficient criterion for establishing the presence of thought. This claim, which can be traced back to Leibniz and has been repeatedly reinforced in the history of cognitive science, from Helmholtz to Friston, is extended here to artificial systems. In a functional sense, a language model may be said to possess understanding, which makes both the denial of such understanding on introspective grounds and its uncritical apologetic defense inadequate. The architectural paradox of the transformer – recursive productivity in the absence of a recursive architecture – empirically settles the Chomsky–Skinner dispute without resolving the theoretical question of the nature of recursive competence. The typological basis for this claim lies in the structural correspondence between two operations: the minimization of variational free energy in predictive coding and the computation of weighted similarity in the attention mechanism. In both cases, representations are iteratively refined through the reduction of the discrepancy between the model and the input data. The possibility of substantive intellectual exchange between humans and language models – joint reasoning, mutual correction, and productive disagreement – would be difficult to account for in the absence of this typological kinship. At the same time, the gap between biological and artificial intelligence can be traced across four levels: energetic, computational, semantic, and temporal. At each of these levels, what is at stake is not a merely quantitative lag but a qualitatively distinct mode of organizing informational processes. The article concludes that the question of machine thinking must therefore be reformulated: transformer-based and biological processes may be understood as different instantiations of a single computational type – the hierarchical reduction of uncertainty – which constitutes a typological feature of intelligence as such. The gap between these two forms of intelligence is real, but it lies within a common genus rather than between fundamentally different genera.

The article examines the transformation of higher education under the influence of artificial intelligence, digital learning environments, and NBICS convergence – the integration of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, cognitive science, and the social sciences and humanities. At the heart of this transformation lies a fundamental tension between two conceptions of education: education as a practice devoted to cultivating autonomous, critically reflective subjects, and education as a mechanism for adapting learners to increasingly digital, AI-driven, and sociotechnical environments. The article conceptualizes education as a historically constituted interface of the Enlightenment: a mediating framework connecting human beings with knowledge, culture, and social practice. As education becomes increasingly subordinated to market imperatives and algorithmic forms of governance, however, its emancipatory and Enlightenment-oriented functions are placed at risk. Digitalization is shown to transform not only the transmission of knowledge but also the conditions under which knowledge is produced, validated, and legitimized. Big-data analytics and deep neural networks shift the epistemological emphasis from causal explanation (knowing why) to the identification of correlations (knowing what), thereby progressively enclosing rationality within the computational “black box.” These developments are accompanied by a crisis of the educational subject. The learner is increasingly conceived as a distributed, technologically mediated agent, while debates about education converge with the transhumanist project of human “enhancement” and technological reconfiguration within the NBIC paradigm. The author argues that transhumanism should not be regarded as the inevitable horizon of educational and technological development. In response to this technoscientific challenge, the article advances the project of a Neo-Enlightenment. This project entails a systematic reorientation of education away from the logic of calculative pragmatism and toward the values and structures of meaning that sustain subjective and intersubjective existence. The social-scientific and humanistic dimension of the NBICS complex should therefore be understood not as a counterweight to technological development, but as one of its essential conditions. Ultimately, the most fundamental source and object of innovation is neither a device nor a function, but the human being.

The digital transformation of the communicative environment increasingly risks reducing human beings to reactive components within technical systems. This development calls for a renewed account of the human capacity for subjective experience under contemporary technological conditions. Existing approaches to consciousness tend either toward illusionism, with its denial of mental causation, or toward some form of dualism between consciousness and matter. David Dubrovsky’s informational theory of subjective reality offers a materialist solution to the mind–body problem, but its central principle of informational invariance requires further refinement in light of recent research on the embodied and multilevel organization of consciousness. The article brings neurophysiological research into dialogue with the process-oriented ontology of Chinese philosophy. On this basis, subjective reality is understood as the dynamic activity of a living system shaped by critical patterns of neural activity, the bodily organization of experience, and the cultural environment. Such activity depends on a flexible balance between stability and responsiveness. This balance emerges in living autopoietic systems, in which higher-order forms of consciousness arise through the integration of bodily rhythms, attention, and social interaction. The algorithmic structuring of the communicative environment narrows the interval between stimulus and response, thereby intensifying behavioral reactivity and encouraging the formalization of subjectivity. By contrast, the Confucian conception of ritual can be understood as a form of embodied ethical practice that restores the temporal space required for meaningful action and incorporates somatic structures of experience into the formation of the subject. Ritual sustains the duration necessary for self-organization, attentiveness to the particularities of a situation, and the exercise of mental causation. The preservation and adaptation of traditional ritual forms, together with the cultivation of individual embodied practices, may therefore provide a means of resisting the mechanization of subjectivity in the digital age. This argument is further illustrated by the experience of integrating digital technologies into the Chinese educational system. The proposed cross-cultural synthesis contributes to the development of an account of subjectivity that recognizes the inseparability of the conscious, embodied, and ethical dimensions of human existence.