Emergent Mormon Perspectives on Kurzweilian Epochs of Evolution

Caleb Jones

Okay, so who here is familiar with Cruswellian epochs or epochs of evolution? Okay, small handful. So I’m going to cover all of them. Obviously not in depth, otherwise we’d be here for several hours. And there’s a risk at that, right? I’m going to touch on things, kind of skip off the water, and move on. If you’re new to this, this hopefully will be a good introduction for you. And if you are well aware of this, I’m going to bring aspects of emergentism and Mormonism together in this. Hopefully that’ll add a new Flavor and uh a new hue to this that uh you might not have uh seen before. So um

Caleb Jones

So early in his career, Jason Silva produced a video where he went over the Curtis William epochs of evolution. And his final statement kind of Started my brain on this years ago, and so this has been ruminating for a while. But he said, talking about the final epoch. a complete flourishing of nanotechnology and biotechnology, we impregnate the universe with intelligence. We merge with all matter and universe, and the universe essentially wakes up. And then he says, tell me that that is not an intoxicating idea. The kind of idea that inspired Alan Harrington to say, having created the gods, we can turn into them. So note this reference, or this kind of ring at the end of self-referentiality. That’s similar to the ring we have in Mormonism in that couplet. As man is, God once was, and as God is, man may become. However, in Mormonism, rather than seeing this as an invention of God’s, Mormonism teaches a coevolution of God’s through Christ that mankind can evolve into. I believe Mormonism with its naturalistic ontology or cosmology and eschatology provides a real novel and robust way to syncretize the often split apart worldviews of science and religion. Something which I think may become increasingly important for religion to adapt and find relevant expression now and moving forward.

Caleb Jones

Now emergentism, where does that come in? I’m biased towards an emergentism worldview. That forms some of the contours that I see here. I’m going to draw a lot from an essay from that’s titled that’s from Ursula Goodenough and Terence Deakin. It’s titled The Sacred Emergence of Nature. It was published in the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, April 2008. I want to read a little excerpt here, and then I’ll start jumping into some of these epics. It says, It talks about making the movie of science. And in order to do that, It’s interesting because we have to understand things from a reduction, a kind of reductive perspective, to find the characters that need to go into the movie. However, that’s not the way things arose. Things arose temporally in the opposite, or rather than breaking these bits apart, things arose by combining and emerging traits out of different evolutionary processes. And I think that goes well with Kurzwillian epochs of evolution as well.

Caleb Jones

So I’ll go to the next one. Alright, so these different epics that we have here go across from atoms all the way to this transcendent kind of Utopia that Jason Silva described. And I’ll step through each one. Now the format of this is: I decided, you know, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth maybe more, I don’t know. Maybe add up the frames. but maybe it’ll confuse things. So I don’t know. Rather than having stills up here as the images, I put little movies, obviously sound muted. I’m not going to try to talk over other people talking. But that kind of display these epics.

Caleb Jones

So first one, Epic 1. Time scale we’re dealing with here is billions of years. Primary driving engines, gravity, galaxies, stars, planets. Ultimately, this will culminate in DNA, but the feedback loops here often are stars. In that essay, Goodenough mentions a key concept. talking about the combination of atoms to make water, the mod water molecule, and how that’s a reconfiguration of electron orbitals. and it generates a trapezoidal shaped entity that is more electrically positive on one facet and more negative on the opposite facet. Now, going on quoting here says, Now we can consider what happens when water molecules interact with one another. The emergent outcomes are numerous. Ice displays buoyancy, crystalline organization, and hardness. Water displays surface tension and viscosity. None of these properties is displayed by individual water molecules. What matters are the dynamical regularities in the ways in which large number of these molecules interact with one another. This is where some of my personal fascination with networks and the properties that emerge out of networks that you can see when you visualize them and analyze them at a system level. Really resonates with me personally.

Caleb Jones

Now, an irrelevant Mormon idea here is that matter and consciousness are co-eternal with God. Like a gardener, a creator could establish these early epochs and tend them as they grow to provide an environment or substrate out of which this which this coeternal consciousness can emerge in later stages, the fruit of creation. Perhaps a a creator optimizing for authentic coeternal diversity cannot force intelligence to emerge spontaneously. just as we cannot spontaneously force water to form into ice. The ice must emerge within the bounds of its chemistry, interacting with the environment around it.

Caleb Jones

So the next epic here. Epic two. This is information traits and biological structures now. Hundreds of millions of years. These are rough estimates, obviously. Biological evolution through natural selection is very prominent. Excuse me, that was Epic One. Epic 2. Here we go. So, in addition to information still being expressed in atoms and chemicals, information here can now be encoded and evolved in DNA. While biological structures are reducible to atomic structures, they are also capable of expressing and producing something very different from atoms or chemicals. This pattern continues between each epoch, where the sum of the culmination of the parts of one epoch continues to generate something else entirely different in the next.

Caleb Jones

I’ll read a little excerpt here from this Goodenough essay here. She says, one way to misread this account that the gene is that the genes rule. Not only is this misreading inherently depressing and religiously sterile, it also misses the point. Genomes are in fact the handmaidens of emergent properties. Not the other way around. A successful life outcome is to promote the production of emergent outcomes called traits in biology that collectively make their own continuation more likely. It’s traits that rule, genes follow in their wake. Traits common to all organisms include such non-depressing and religiously fertile capacities as endirectiveness and identity maintenance. Traits common to all animals include awareness. and the capacity for pleasure and suffering. Traits common to social beings include cooperation and meaning making. Traits common to birds and mammals include bonding and nurturance. Traits common to humans include language and its capacity to share subjective experience, and thus to know love. Transmission of genomes is the steady background drumbeat. Emergence is the music. I love that turn of phrase at the end there.

Caleb Jones

From a Moran perspective, this can be seen as culminating in a neurobiological substrate out of which our present mind or consciousness emerges. A creative God’s goal here is to have a substrate arise in which moral and intellectual traits capable of human expression, including religious expression, can emerge. A creative God is looking for the emergence of a co-eternal mind capable of imbibing and transmitting godly traits.

Caleb Jones

All right, Epic Three. Traits and information in brains. That hundreds of thousands of years development here, culture, music, language, religions are these primary driving engines. This can culminate in technological revolution, and the feedbacks here are creative memetic life cycles might be some of those feedback loops. So now information stored in neural patterns. So while DNA provided a large leap forward from emergence of traits in chemical or atomic substrates, neural organs jumped light years past that.

Caleb Jones

I go again from that essay, Sacred Emergence of Nature. Understanding that a mature mammalian brain may contain a hundred billion neurons, each synaptic communication with some 1,000 other neurons connections. all put together under the watch of a genome with some twenty thousand genes, clarifies why it is so inaccurate to speak of a gene as being for a particular mental capacity. There’s that irreducibility of some of the traits that emerged.

Caleb Jones

So, Deacon, the co-author in that essay with Ursula Goodenough, he makes this bold claim in his book, The Symbolic Species. He says, Biologically, we are just another ape. Mentally, we are a whole new phylum of organism. Our whole new traits, symbolic language, Cultural transmission of ideas via languages and an autobiographical self are the central importance to our lives and religious selves. What is particularly interesting about the course of human evolution is that it has entailed the coevolution of three emergent modalities, brain, symbolic language, and culture. Each feeding into and responding to the other two, and hence jittering particularly complex patterns and outcomes. Importantly, while reductionist understandings of how minds work are fascinating, They are also irrelevant to what it means to what it’s like to be minded.

Caleb Jones

A Mormon narrative here, the archetypes of Adam or Eve enter the picture late in this epoch. And it’s here that the language about mankind is given the status of having the image of God. Mankind is made out of the dust of the earth and exists in the context of biological and atomic expressions from the previous epics. But it is an entirely new creature that shares traits with God. Notably, God gives the commandment to subdue the earth In the context of epics of evolution, this is a commandment and challenge to move from this third epoch, from this third primitive epoch into the epics that follow. This is a mandate to do science. and to no longer be entirely at the mercy of natural selection as we transcend it and become creators of our own environments, thus having that image or trait of God. This will ultimately allow us to look at the world around us, imagine how things might be different, and then pull the present forward to that vision. A creative God looks for the traits of novel creativity.

Caleb Jones

Moving on to the next epic four. Traits and information extends to tools and technology. Time scale, a few thousand years. Now technology is a lot older than that, but talking about this particular uptick in the exponential increase in technology. Primary drivers and engines, philosophy, science, agriculture, economics, government, things like that. Ultimately, culminating in the merger of biology and technology in that next epoch. And the feedback loop here is really advanced tools used to exponentially create more advanced tools.

Caleb Jones

An important pause here is to reflect on what it means to be human in this age. Again, from that essay, Sacred Emergence of Nature, they say, human consciousness is not merely an emergent phenomenon, it epitomizes the logic of emergence in its very form. Human minds, deeply entangled in symbolic culture, have an effective causal locus that extends across continents and millennia. Growing out of the experiences of countless individuals. Consciousness emerges as an incessant creation of something from nothing. of process continually transcending itself. To be human is to know what it feels like to be evolution happening. I think there’s some echoes of Mormon doctrine of co-eternality there, which we so often don’t talk about or really dive into much.

Caleb Jones

All right, again. Some of the primary drivers here don’t replace the drivers of the previous epic. Things such as culture, music, language, religion still play a powerful role in what it means to be human. as do biological and atomic processes. But this epoch is where technology becomes a powerful driver at sharply accelerating rates, affecting us as a species and the traits that emerge in the environments we create.

Caleb Jones

In this epic, Mormonism has the notion of many dispensations, distinct periods of times and locations where new modalities of religion are expressed and recontextualized in the framework of prophecy, scripture, and culture, so forth. With the dispensation, the fullness of times being what we describe as presently being this dispensation. So Mormonism does not require casting religion into Ecstatic creeds. In fact, it calls for continuous revelation and the adaptation of religion to greater and greater understandings of reality. And science and technology expands the realities. Faith takes root in those new realities and seeks to transcend them. That’s another feedback loop. Faith needs proof to stand on. And as it reaches, and proof need and proof cries out for faith to stand on it. This is similar to how B. H. Roberts framed discipleship in Mormonism. The disciples of Mormonism will take yet profounder and broader views of the great doctrines committed to the Church, and departing from mere repetition, will cast them in new formulas, cooperating in the works of the Spirit. until they give and help to give the truths received a more forceful expression and carry it beyond the earlier, more and cruder stages of development.

Caleb Jones

We’ll get through these next two here shortly. Epic five, traits and information and in as mind and technology merge. So centuries here? I don’t know. We’re starting now moving from Where we, you know, many believe we are at the cusp of entering into this epoch, if not already started to enter into it. Biotech, virtual reality, environmental rejuvenation. and biohacking, those sorts of things will be these drivers and loops that drive this. This is much of what transhumanism focuses on in with cybernetics, life extension, cryonics, resource liberation, so forth. And the promises of humanity harnessing these technologies are huge, as are the risks. An open question is whether this will follow the you might have noticed the Magnitude reduction in these epochs, right? Billions of years of the atomic chemical, hundreds of millions in this DNA hundreds of thousands in this neurological and so forth. So we have this sort of accelerating reduction in time. As we look to the future, will that continue? I don’t know. That’s an open question.

Caleb Jones

But what I want to discuss in this one, in the limited time I have, is some of the ideas about how the organism of religion can navigate this epoch. Mormonism’s vision doesn’t stop here at Epic IV. In fact, it projects Nori’s self into future epics. John A. Woodso described Mormon eschatology as being coupled to evolution. He said, Under the law of evolution, man’s organization will become more and more complex that is, he will increase in his power to use intelligence until in time he will develop so far that in comparison with his present state he will be a god.

Caleb Jones

A key feature necessary for religion to carry its traits into the future with augmented or changed biologies is adaptability. His adaptability need not threaten religious expression any more than technological advancement would threaten artistic or cultural expression. The MTA, as it stands for the ethical use of technology and religion to expand human abilities, I think is well suited to do this work. of promoting and adapting traits of religion that find meaningful expression into and through this epoch. Mormism itself is strongly adaptable, even if some of its cultural expressions can be stubborn. Joseph Smith taught, The LDS have no creed, but they are ready to believe all true principles that exist as they are made manifest from time to time. And elsewhere, if there’s anything virtuous, lovely, or good reporter praiseworthy, we seek after these things. So just as the traits of atoms successfully persisted in later epochs, the emergence of chemicals and biology and neurology and so forth. The ability to dynamically interoperate with other traits, including traits originating from outside it, will allow religion to successfully carry their traits into what emerges in this epoch and beyond. religions or the phylum of their interpretations which cannot do this or struggle or will struggle or even fade away as notions of mind, body, consciousness, and reality bend and stretch into future epochs.

Caleb Jones

So this last one here, Epic Six, no video. I didn’t have the time to animate that by hand or anything. It’s a beautiful picture. Traits and information is mind and creation merge. So, time scale, I don’t know, does time even make sense here? Nanotech, created environments, infinite emergence of intelligence, culminates in gods, post-humanity. Created environments out of which new intelligences emerge could be this feedback loop here.

Caleb Jones

So here, post-humanity begins to wield the universe. atomic all the way through these other scales, possibly becoming one with it or transcending it altogether. That’s where a lot of science fiction gets drawn from. Consciousness begins to blur here as a level of interpersonal intimacy and unity previously unimaginable becomes possible. Unified minds wielding the universe or universes in unencumbered flourishing of created environments becomes a key driver of the traits that emerge in creative godhood. Creating environments from which infinitely diverse and entirely novel intelligences can emerge as co-eternal minds could become a final, inexhaustible frontier. As gods of these environments, post-human creators could experience that emergence on an entirely new level as they can enter or descend into these environments. Experiencing and guiding these newly emergent minds through their own stages of evolution and emergence, optimizing for emergent diversity.

Caleb Jones

Mormon narratives around God and salvation strongly orient towards this possibility. However, Mormonism doesn’t see this epic as only being in our future. It also sees it in our past, as we are the beneficiaries of this type of environment created by gods. In this view, humanity’s potential is nothing short of progressing through epics of evolution to become likewise gods ourselves. As Joseph Smith said, and I think it’s been quoted in other talks here, you’ve got to learn how to be gods yourselves. By going from one small degree to another, from a small capacity to a great one, from grace to grace, exaltation to exaltation, and I would add from epic to epoch here. Until you attain to the resurrection of the dead, and are able to dwell in everlasting burnings, and to sit in glory, and do as those who sit enthroned in everlasting power.

Caleb Jones

So, I agree with Jason Silla that this is an intoxicating idea, both on the secular side of me as well as the religious side. So, just a final thought here. So as we ponder where mankind’s been, where it’s going now, where it’s moving in this evolutionary journey. I think Mormonism has an important role to play with its strong emphasis on naturally emergent theology, eschatology, cosmology, and so forth. So this provides a novel and I think robust way to approach, newly approach syncretizing some of the traits of science and religion into something that might emerge that’s entirely new. So indeed, religion’s ability to do this, I think, in excel in carrying traits forward into what emerges into future epics. will be very critical in religion’s ability to flourish in the coming future.

Speaker 2

So, and as I personally seek to carry these traits, the best traits out of science, the best traits out of religion, and mix them in my life and in my faith, I personally find a welcome home in Mormonism. Thanks.