Detail from the cover of Nikola Kesarovski’s 1983 book The Fifth Law of Robotics. Illustration by Hristo Braykov
The age of technology has radically transformed communication and the ways information is stored, yet our body continues to remind us of its autonomy. It breathes, ages, feels pain, and slows down despite our attempts to accelerate biology to its limits. In the era of Instagram culture, the body has turned into a screen onto which we project ideals and expectations. Once again, the body becomes not only an object of physiological experience but also an arena where worldviews, cultural norms, and techno-utopias collide.
As Merleau-Ponty wrote, the body is not an object or a mechanism, but a way of being in the world. For thousands of years, humanity has balanced between two ideas: accepting one’s mortality as a natural law and attempting to overcome it at any cost. For the Egyptians, the physical shell of a person was a link to eternity. By preserving the body, they sought to preserve the soul and the social status of the deceased, turning the body into a symbol of power and immortality. Mummies, ritual balms, removal of internal organs, and golden masks—all these practices were aimed at deceiving biological entropy and preserving the body outside of time. Empress Poppaea Sabina bathed in donkey milk, believing that the skin could hold onto escaping youth if one knew the right recipe. Later, when religion gave way to rational thinking, the dream did not disappear—it merely changed its language. Gods and alchemy were replaced by genetics, nanomedicine, cryonics, and artificial intelligence.
The body as architect: data, biology, and a new humanism
Modern science confirms what ancient thinkers intuited: the body is not a passive shell but an active co-author of consciousness. Medical research shows that motor skills, breathing, gut microbiota, and hormonal fluctuations are not mere biological details but fundamental elements in shaping character, emotions, planning ability, and self-control.
Personality is formed not only by the brain but also by the body, which sets the rhythm and conditions of its functioning. Introversion, anxiety, creativity, or hyperfocus often reflect how the body—through neurochemistry, sensory systems, neural pathways, and metabolic processes—influences the maturation of various neural networks: emotional centers, prefrontal control areas, and associative hubs of logic. This is why one child grows up an observer, another hypersensitive, and a third a conceptual thinker: behavioral strategy emerges from biological rhythm and the sequence of network maturation determined by the body. Asynchronies in network development create unique thinking strategies, while experience and environment merely guide their evolution, forming a complex, multilayered personality in which the body sets the conditions.
The study Minding the Gut shows that microbiota and hormonal signals are real co-creators of thought. The authors emphasize that cognitive processes must be studied more broadly, including the “gut mind.” The paper Embodied Cognition: Perspectives within Early Executive Development demonstrates that in children aged 3–5, motor skills, movement, and bodily interactions directly shape executive functions: the body literally teaches the child to plan, regulate behavior, and sustain attention. Finally, Brain Signatures of Embodied Semantics and Language shows that language is not a set of abstract symbols. Muscular, motor, and sensory processes are embedded in the very meaning of words—we literally feel speech with our bodies.
Transhumanism vs healthhumanism
The body has always been an arena of philosophical debate — from Plato’s “prison of the soul” to the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who argued that the body is a form of consciousness. Transhumanism, emerging at the intersection of utopia and techno-optimism, has secured a special place in modern science and culture. In an era when traditional religions are losing influence and modernist ideals seem outdated, it offers a new faith—a rationalized dream of salvation through technology. Its appeal lies not only in the promise of overcoming death, disease, and bodily limitations, but also in how it speaks about humans: as a project that can be endlessly improved and upgraded.
The magic of transhumanism lies in its visual language. It easily translates philosophical ideas into simple images: implants, chips, digital immortality, gene therapy, neural interfaces. In a world accustomed to software updates, the idea of a new version of the human feels like a natural evolution. Transhumanism consoles us by claiming that death is merely a coding error that can be fixed. In this comforting illusion, many find a new, almost religious meaning. Apostles of transhumanism, such as Ray Kurzweil, predict an era in which aging and death will be defeated and consciousness can be digitized and live forever.
Merleau-Ponty proposed a radical idea back in the mid-20th century: consciousness is not confined to the head; the mind “lives in the body,” and perception is not a reflection of the world but a co-existence with it. He called this “field consciousness”—a state in which body and brain form a single fabric of experience. In the 21st century, this idea unexpectedly returns—but in digital form. The human body is gradually enveloped by a network of personal devices, sensors, and algorithms linked by a shared data flow. Paradoxically, it is precisely the philosophy of the body—embodied cognition—that brings us back to a simple truth: consciousness is inseparable from flesh. This contradicts transhumanism but opens the path to a real revolution, where digital twins, wearable sensors, and artificial intelligence become partners in dialogue with the body, enabling disease dynamics to be predicted, lifestyles adjusted, therapeutic scenarios modeled, and—most importantly—the dynamics of one’s health to be visualized in real time.
Memento Mori & natural beauty
Natural beauty is returning to public discourse today with unexpected force, almost as an act of cultural resistance. Throughout the 20th century, beauty gradually lost its individuality, becoming a standardized image carefully constructed by an industry in which the ideal exists not in reality but on magazine pages and heavily edited social media profiles. Yet here, too, the body acts as a marker of reality. A study by Cardiff University showed that faces with excessive symmetry and a lack of micro-movements are perceived by the brain as less “human,” producing mild discomfort—the uncanny valley effect previously known in robotics.
Out of fatigue with standardized perfection emerges a renewed interest in naturalness. Psychologists at Harvard University found in a series of experiments that faces with subtle signs of age—fine lines around the eyes and natural skin texture—are perceived as more trustworthy, mature, and emotionally accessible than rejuvenated or retouched faces. This finding is particularly striking against decades of cultural pressure suggesting that youth is a prerequisite for beauty.
Science reinforces this shift. Neurophysiological fMRI studies conducted at the University of Toronto’s Sensory Perception Laboratory show that the brain responds more strongly to signs of a living, healthy body—such as natural skin micro-relief, gentle asymmetries, and emotional micro-expressions—than to idealized images with heavy retouching or surgical intervention.
Examples from culture and fashion also support these findings. Celebrities who openly display naturalness become symbols of a new philosophy. Helen Mirren, despite public scrutiny and industry demands, embraces elegant aging without hiding gray hair or wrinkles, showing that maturity can be beautiful and complete. Jane Fonda, in her 80s, continues to lead an active life, participate in social movements, and share her experience, demonstrating the value of active engagement with one’s body and time. Actress Sally Field and television host Oprah Winfrey emphasize in interviews the importance of accepting time, aging, and finitude, speaking openly about illness and the loss of loved ones. Model Heidi Klum has recently rejected excessive retouching, showing her real wrinkles and changing body, resonating with millions of followers. Cher, known for her bold image, openly discusses age, health, and natural bodily changes, dismantling the myth of eternal youth.
Corpus longae vitae - the long-living body
Alongside technological approaches and cultural shifts, new ideas emerge. One of them is corpus longae vitae, a new medical paradigm in which the body is a dynamic system capable of living longer than dictated by genetic сценарий. It envisions a body that technology can help by predicting states and correcting health trajectories as naturally as adjusting a route via GPS.
This concept is impossible without a digital twin. The digital twin becomes a second layer of physiology—a mirror of processes usually hidden from consciousness. It detects early signals, models the consequences of decisions, predicts complications, and proposes personalized treatment scenarios. The review article Digital Twins: From Personalised Medicine to Precision Public Health explains that such virtual models integrate laboratory data, genomics, wearable sensor data, and medical history, creating a bidirectional link between the body and its digital reflection. Other studies, such as Digital Twins in Health Care: Ethical Implications of an Emerging Engineering Paradigm, note that digital twins reflect not only molecular status but also lifestyle and everyday physiology.
Unlike transhumanism, which promises immortality, the digital twin does not seek to replace the body. It becomes a mediator between biology and knowledge — a feedback system that helps us understand internal bodily processes. This unfolds through technological ecosystems like Apple Health and DeHealth, which create personal health ontologies — structured data networks where analysis, anamnesis, biomarkers, and AI insights are integrated. Such networks can uncover hidden dependencies and predict risks, much like the periodic table once predicted unknown elements.
Philosophically, the digital twin continues the line of embodied cognition: the body is not merely a vessel for the mind but a system in which rhythms, chemistry, emotions, and memory form a unified experience. When many digital twins are connected into a network, a new infrastructure emerges—a digital noosphere with properties of self-learning, emergence, and collective health. As medical data become complete, structured, and interconnected, the digital twin becomes a new norm—an everyday attribute of life, like a passport, an electronic medical record, or a blood test result. And in this new alliance of biology and data, we begin not merely to treat the body, but to listen to it — and to design its future.
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