Arsen Dzantiev

As a child I asked strange questions. If I wanted it badly enough, could I walk through a wall? What if we were microbes living in the belly of a giant and never knew it?

I never walked through a wall, but I found out that human thought can. It breaks through every wall in its way, finds another behind it and keeps going. I'm in love with that. However, the giant is still an open question…

What I did learn is that the world we can see is already a system of systems: everything is connected to everything else, and from the inside we notice only a few of the connections.

Maxim Gorky wrote that for Man “only the flame of Thought lights up the obstacles on his path, the riddles of life, the dusk of nature's secrets and the dark chaos in his heart”. Dialectical materialism is the lens that gathers this light into a beam and points it at the connections still in the dark.

I found this method in Yuri Semenov's course “Introduction to the Science of Philosophy” at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. I was lost then, and the course helped me rebuild my ontological picture of the world.

Building software is how the structure in my head reflects reality, and how my imagination changes reality in return. I travel to broaden the context I think in.

Cooking and photography take me a little deeper into reality, close enough to learn its taste and drink it in.

I value progress and the people who move it: in science, medicine, technology, the humanities and sport, in any work that brings people together and helps them grow. My dream is to add something of my own to that progress, however small, and to leave the world at least one per cent better than I found it.