Gardens of the Soul

A reflection on defensive memetic engineering, and what lies beyond

Laura Deming · Feb 2026

Since I was 12, I've worked in the field of longevity. Fear of death motivated most of my work in the first decade of my career. It was effective, but had a cost I did not see - I was unable to see the technology I was involved with in all of its complexity. I was closed to the view of it that went out to the horizon, to the ways in which it might grow and mutate away from my original intention. Instead, I focused on what needed to happen for it to exist as quickly as possible to fulfill the need that I had.

I don't feel that fear of death, right now. And I'm struck by how many facets of this technology I couldn't see. To give a few examples:

1. I hadn't considered what longevity was trying to preserve. Our notions of personal identity come from a culture which longevity technology would necessarily change. People change over time, so - in Parfit's view - the thing most compatible with our current intuitive desires about longevity is the preservation of some continuity relation which involves causality between this moment and the next. But would we care about this, in a world changed such that this technology was introduced - what new intuitions or taboos would we develop?

2. I hadn't considered what new choices would be created, by longevity technology. Our brains evolved for a particular lifespan, so changes to allow a given body to survive beyond that are inherently transhumanist and subjective. How would we treat the accumulation and integration of memory over time, in a brain which could live 100s of years? This choice would (I think) not obviously follow from our current design, so choice is involved, and choices made in technological design here would be likely to fundamentally alter our identity. What new beings would we create, in the application of longevity technology?

3. I hadn't considered the possibilities - the actual possibilities - longevity technology would enable. It's hard to describe, but for some reason my vision of a 'very long lived person' was someone who just, sort of, looked like a human, but was wise and had slightly different - possibly more cautious or nuanced - social norms. Now, when I consider such a possibility - all I can see is a vast expanse, and a complete unknown. Entities allowed to grow and evolve over even hundreds of years would be new beings, different from those people we know today. Some might stay closely human, but I no longer regard this intuition as anywhere near the truth of what this technology pulses towards.

I can also see where I was confused - I imagined that we would be trying to keep something static as close as possible to its original form, but I now see that what this technology most generally enables is causally connected growth - and evolution - of an entity over long time scales. Imagine a garden allowed to grow, mutate, evolve, and emerge over thousands of years. On some level, the phenomenon of life already provides an example of such a long arc. It has been continuousl, transmitted through time, for approaching 4 billion years. I think the difference between us and such long-lived creatures is akin to the difference between the first cell and a human, today. It is hard to imagine them. I think about such beings as large, complex gardens, tended to, grown, weeded, become rampant, cut back over millenia. We do not know what these gardens of the soul will be, and our simple conceptions of them - which rely, essentially, on placing ourselves in a version of the future slightly changed - will not reflect the reality that comes to pass.

I think about such beings as large, complex gardens, tended to, grown, weeded, become rampant, cut back over millennia. We do not know what these gardens of the soul will be, and our simple conceptions of them — which rely, essentially, on placing ourselves in a version of the future slightly changed — will not reflect the reality that comes to pass.

I believe that it is good to grow technology in such a way that we are not blind to its many possibilities. I also think that we should generally develop technologies that fulfill near-term urgent medical needs for the general population, unless there is a very clear reason not to. That's just my moral intuition. But I'm more interested now, than ever, in what will happen in the future.

Technology has felt to me like a binary - 'will we get it or not?'. I'm interested in a different perspective, to add to this - 'how will we grow it?'. And, on some level, what does it want to become? Who do we want to become?

I am glad to have spent much of my life next to this technology - and, in the future, I would like to include in my time with it the capacity to see it clearly for what it is today, to imagine the many things it might be, and not to simplify my view of it at all times from fear that if I don't it would not exist.