Kristine Haglund

This keynote speech explores the tension between artistic form and emotional excess, drawing on examples from Baroque music, German Romanticism, and Mormon history. The speaker argues that human feeling constantly overflows the containers we create for it—whether musical forms, literary genres, or religious systems—and that this “life’s hunger to abound” is essential to both artistic and spiritual experience. Through Joseph Smith’s weeping at his father’s baptism and other moments of transcendent emotion, she suggests that transhumanism should embrace this paradigm of abundance rather than fear of scarcity, asking whether we pursue longer, better lives because we fear death or because we believe love can cast out that fear.

In this panel discussion, Ralph Merkle, Kristine Haglund, and Lincoln Cannon field audience questions on topics ranging from cryptocurrency and governance to theodicy and the nature of God. Merkle discusses the potential of Bitcoin’s distributed algorithm for governance and the challenge of achieving stable government over transhumanist timescales. Haglund shares her “personal heresy” that God may not have complete foreknowledge, likening divine knowledge to a “choose your own adventure” book. Cannon offers a Mormon transhumanist interpretation of the Holy Spirit as the sublime aesthetic embedded in creation that provokes us toward compassion and creativity—the grace of possibility pushing us to become gods ourselves.