Keynote Speech

Speaker 1

Hi. Um I would like to pretend that I’m reading from my laptop because I’m so environmentally conscious. And I’m good, but actually it’s because I never finish in time to actually print out a presentation ever.

Speaker 1

About a million years ago, when I was in graduate school, one of my colleagues came in one day and she said, You know what happened last night? Some missionaries from your church knocked on my door, and they started talking about how you could be with your family forever. Like that was a good thing.

Speaker 1

A novice to transhumanist thinking and writing can have a little bit the same response. They’re talking about human beings becoming smarter and living longer. as if that was a good thing. Most of us are lucky enough to have experiences that help us imagine why one might want to live with one’s family forever, although some of us will also know why one might not want to. I want to think carefully today about why we might want to be smarter or live longer and about how that why should matter.

Speaker 1

And since I know far less than mo than all of you about transhumanism, I want to start about talking some things I might know more about than some of you. German literature and music, and depression. Go ahead and make all the jokes you want about the potential causal links between those two or three.

Speaker 1

First, let’s see, Baroque music. And I’m going to go backwards. One of the features of Baroque music, the one that we usually think of as defining the genre, is ornamentation. Singers and instrumentalists were licensed and encouraged to augment what was written in the score with trills and mordens and apogiaturas. And doppled cadences and accents and all kinds of other things that you see notated there.

Speaker 1

But all of this happened above the baso continuo, or figured base, which was a very strict system by which actually this picture is too blurry for you to see it, but Above the bottom score, you can see numbers, and those quite strictly define the chord progression that has to come out and how the bass line should progress through a piece. The history of this form of accompaniment is what I want to think about today.

Speaker 1

It’s almost certain that this strict and independent baseline arose as a means of coordinating polychoral works. Works that were composed for two or more choirs, usually for especially festive occasions, or sometimes to highlight architectural features of churches. They’d place choirs in all the niftiest spots in the building, and then they’d all sing together and people would look around at the building. But in order to keep that together, they’d have instrumentalists in the center that At first, we’re just doubling the choral parts, and those parts would be all written out precisely for the instrumentalists the way that they were for the singers. And they kept the celebration from flying apart.

Speaker 1

Eventually, the bass would continue, which supported and augmented the other vocal or instrumental parts instead of merely doubling them. developed and and this form of of just notating briefly the form of the chord with a number allowed a sort of freedom in within the form that That eventually made it possible for the bass to not just keep things together, but to provide enough of an underlying texture that you could have a solo instrument or um a solo singer doing all kinds of interesting melodic things, but with enough oomph from the from the bass to to make it sound rich.

Speaker 1

Um I think if this works we might even be a To hear some of it. Let’s see. No. Okay, well we don’t have to. You guys have all heard the Bach Easter Oratorial, right? Anybody want to sing it? Okay. Don’t worry, you have to sing later later on in this presentation, so

Speaker 3

Whoops, but we can hear it. Okay.

Speaker 1

Thanks. There it is. I think you can hear the bass. Oh, okay. Well, never mind. I I’m a I’m a I’m a humanist. I don’t do this stuff. It’s all right. We’ll uh We’ll get back. You can imagine. You’ve heard enough Bach to know, you know, the singers doing their trills and the bass going neatly.

Speaker 1

So ultimately, the possibilities opened by having this independent and predictable bass line led to monotic forms of music that could support a soloist. That leads to cantatas that incorporate soloists as well as new chorale forms, and eventually to opera and sort of everything that comes after that Those forms eventually become too rich and complicated for figured bass to fully realize, and so the more complex orchestrations of the classical and subsequent musical styles require once again a fully notated part for the bass instruments along with the rest of the orchestra and chorus.

Speaker 1

So there’s this wonderful progress of musical innovation and celebration outstripping the extant forms. developing new forms, and then again overflowing those new forms and reaching back for the old forms newly understood which give expression to new ideas

Speaker 1

We could, if we were being sweeping and grandiose and oversimplifying a lot, trace a similar progression in literature. The German Baroque literature becomes obsessed both with form and with breaking that form at the same time.

Speaker 1

This is a passage from the opening of one chapter of Martin Opitz’s book, Das Buch der Deutschen Poetie, which was sort of the first. First attempt at codifying a German literary theory. He starts off by saying this Well, with this statement, he says, Although I have taken it upon myself at the request of other noble-minded people to say something about German poetics. And through that, to better propagate our language, yet I am not of the opinion that somebody may be turned into a poet by means of rules and regulations So he is at least humble about his project.

Speaker 1

But his project is essentially, he says, that he’s going to describe the purpose of poetry in its historical and cultural context. He’s going to give a typology of poetry, giving the genres and their most appropriate applications. He’s going to define poetic style. He’s going to Iterate rhyme and meter with examples of the sonnet and ode and verse forms. And he prescribes the use of Alexandrines as opposed to the low form of Knittelwers, which is this older German. Rhyming verse of four iambic feet. He thinks there should be strict adherence to meter measured by the natural stress in the word, the use of pure rhyme only, and the absolute exclusion of foreign words.

Speaker 1

So despite his belief that you can’t make a poet out of rules and regulations, he does his best to make enough rules that one could become a poet. He does all he achieves all those aims in a book that’s about twenty pages long, which German literature students really appreciate since later people take lots more pages to do that. At the same time, or just a few years after Opus’s book was published.

Speaker 1

came this uh novel called uh Deben Teule Aben Teule le Giert Simplitissimus. Say that three times fast. And this is the first, depending on who you ask, it’s the first Bildungs Roman, or it’s a sort of proto-Bildungs Roman, the form that becomes that. And it takes as the The major plot device, the development of a single character, which is a new thing.

Speaker 1

So this guy, this Abentoche simplicity, Abentoeliche means adventuresome, this adventuresome Odd gesture sort of going through life, and it it makes comments on politics and social convention and all kinds of things, but all through the lens of this Sort of innocent guy bumbling through the world and becoming less naive and more sophisticated. This this idea, even though it’s it’s um Loose and kind of when you read this book, it just seems like it’s episodic. It’s just a bunch of stories, even sort of fanciful tales. But this Seeing a series of things through the eyes of one character is new-ish, at least in German literature, at that point.

Speaker 1

And it becomes, you know, of course, as we know, the form for most novels, right? Character-driven Describes many novels, and it’s even the forerunner of what we have in the sort of declining form of the novel as the memoir, right? So we can thank or blame Timplitissimus for that.

Speaker 1

But there, form is exploded. There’s nothing that rhymes, there’s no structure to the story, none of the conventions of Books up until that time are observed. And it’s very exciting.

Speaker 1

It sort of catches German writers and all of the 18th and 19th century. Everybody reads this, everybody refers to it. It’s a sort of seminal moment in German literature and recognized as a moment where despite the interest and obsession with form and with German language and privileging the vernacular, everything opens up. Everything is open at that moment. And so And that leads to sort of everything that comes after, in much the same way that the figured base both explodes the form and then reforms and leads to big things afterwards.

Speaker 1

The next sort of moment in German literature that people know about is Stromentrang, which is the precursor of Romanticism. And it’s good to take this form of simplipsismos to its logical extreme and creating this character who is all feeling and no rationality and no forethought and no um social convention. And this guy named Werter wears clothes that are um wildly unconventional. He wears yellow pants with Is for some reason just wildly wildly provocative for Germans, these yellow pants. his blue blazer. And he is desperately in love and kills himself because he just can’t stand the overflowing of his feelings. And this leads, believe it or not, to a rash of suicides of young German men in yellow pants. It actually becomes a real problem. So this overflowing of feeling, it’s a thing. And this is the precursor, the introduction, the beginning of Romanticism.

Speaker 1

Which at one point Friedrich Schwegel, who’s considered sort of the found the father of German Romanticism, is asked By a friend to send him a definition of Romanticism, and he says, I can’t. It’s 125 pages long. And that I guess wouldn’t fit in the mail back in the day. But a few years later he did manage to write this succinct definition of What Romantic poetry was trying to be succinct-ish.

Speaker 1

So, this is for those of you who read German because it’s really fun and great. Here’s a sort of loose translation. Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry. Her task is not only to reunify all of the sundered forms of poetry and to bring poetry into communion with philosophy and rhetoric. It will and should also blend, even meld, poetry and prose, appreciation and criticism, art poetry and nature poetry, to make living poetry living and social, and to make life and society poetic. It should poetize humour and fill and satisfy the forms of art with all the stuff of life itself. It should contain everything in a system of art, down to the sigh, the kiss, that the child author breathes out in her artless song. Other forms of writing are finished, and can now only be completely dismembered. But the romantic form is still becoming. Its mode of being is that it is eternally becoming, can never be complete. It cannot be exhausted by any theory. So there’s this sense that everything that has come before is spent, is inadequate to the overflowing feeling and the life force of these new

Speaker 1

And yet, despite rebelling against formalist classicism, the Romantics ended up needing form too. They turned to folk music and folk tales and fairy tales, which they saw as somehow less artificial than other kinds of art. But what’s interesting here is the sense apparently present in almost every new artistic moment that tries to define itself, that life and life feeling have somehow Sorry. Just skipped a page or six have somehow overflowed the conventional forms that the new generation’s sorrows and joys and loves or appreciation of beauty have somehow escaped the bounds of the expressive forms that everyone else knew before them. It’s this moment of excess and abundance that I want us to notice.

Speaker 1

This discussion of excessive feeling in German literature leads us, of course, to the topic of depression. Andrew Solomon, the great writer who wrote The Noonday Demon, which is the most beautiful and optimistic book you will ever read about depression. Says that depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose. Life is fraught with sorrows. We are, each of us, held in the solitude of an autonomous body. Time passes. What has been will never be again Pain is the first experience of world helplessness. I know he must have studied German at some point. Nobody else would put world helplessness together as a compound word. And it never leaves us. Perhaps depression can be best described as emotional pain that forces itself upon us against our will and then breaks free of its externals.

Speaker 1

Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance. Depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance. I’m interested here in this notion of feeling, in this case, pain, that escapes its externals and becomes disproportionate. Solomon doesn’t really doesn’t explain Where it is he derives this sense of what the proportion to circumstance would be. What does it mean to have grief in proportion or out of proportion to circumstance? Why do we have this sense that that feeling should somehow correspond on some scale to our experience. I mean, we we do. I think we walk around with this sense, and a lot of the time when we’re unhappy, it’s because we think we’re not feeling the right way for what’s going on around us. But but where do we have that notion of coincidence? But there is here in Solomon’s comparison of grief and depression this assumption that there’s a proper proportion of circumstance and feeling, and that we get into trouble when there’s an excess. Feeling when grief slips out of the cultural occasions and rituals we have created to contain it.

Speaker 1

But what makes us afraid then, or fearful, or in pain, is not. um not the fear of death. He talks about how you know if if we are going to love, then we are going to be afraid of death because death will take away the the Things that we love. But it’s not really death that is the problem here, but the surfeit of love, this excess of feeling whose expression we cannot contain.

Speaker 1

And goetes Faust, to return for a second to German, to stuff I know. The the uh the thing that is going to make him become human again, to lose his bet with the devil that makes him omnipotent. If he experiences a moment that he enjoys so much, that he loves so much, that he asks for the moment to stay. Verweiled du Bist Sochoen. And if he says that to a moment of human expression, of human love, then he will lose his exalted status that he’s gained by bargaining. With the devil. So there’s this sense that capturing that moment of intense feeling is the thing that makes us most human.

Speaker 1

But we all labor under this idea that somehow there’s a correct proportion of life and feeling, and that if we could just keep things in equilibrium and and not be overcome by um that excess of feeling. We’d we’d everything would be fine. Um then again, maybe it’s not all of us who want that equilibrium.

Speaker 1

Writers, especially poets and musicians are all about this excess of feeling. It’s their stock in trade. And one of the most common responses to the excess of feeling is either to try to invent a new form or explode an old one. To make room for this abundance of sentiment that they always think is the new discovery of their generation.

Speaker 1

Of course, it’s not, right? Jesus. even in the you know, a couple of millennia ago talks about the idea that that new wine and old bottles don’t go together. But there’s what’s constant is this felt need to capture the part of humanity, of humanness, that’s always overflowing. Human art is always after this excessive meaning and capturing it in a way that can be communicated. Most of the time, words are inadequate. Are as inadequate as sonata form for this kind of communication. So we reach for metaphor and even for synesthesia, the sort of conflation of various senses.

Speaker 1

Billy Collins lampoons this tendency in his delightful poem Litany, which you probably all know, but I’m going to read because comic relief is necessary in disquisitions about German literature. His poem is called Litany, and it starts off with a quotation from somebody named Jacques Cricillon, who says, You are the bread and the knife, the crystal goblet and the wine. And then Collins says, You are the bread and the knife, the crystal goblet and the wine. You are the dew on the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun. You are the white apron of the baker and the marsh birds suddenly in flight. However, you are not the wind in the orchard, the plums on the counter, or the house of cards, and you are certainly not the pine scented air. There is just no way that you are the pine scented air. It’s possible that you are the fish under the bridge, maybe even the pigeon on the General’s head, but you are not even close to being the field of cornflowers at dusk. And a quick look in the mirror will show that you are neither the boots in the corner nor the boat asleep in its boathouse. It might interest you to know, speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world, that I am the sound of rain on the roof. I also happen to be the shooting star, the evening paper blowing down an alley, and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table. I am also the moon in the trees and the blind woman’s teacup. But don’t worry, I am not the bread and the knife. You are still the bread and the knife. You will always be the bread and the knife. Not to mention the crystal goblet and, somehow, the wine.

Speaker 1

So, like art, religion is concerned with these moments of excess, with the places where human feeling seems to escape its proper bounds. In the religious context, we call it we often call it transcendence, without really quite specifying what it is we are transcending. The ordinary, the normal. the proportional or dreaded favorite word of Mormons, the appropriate. Unlike art, religion doesn’t usually try to explain or express this excess in human terms. It attributes excess to the divine, makes it originate outside of the human heart, or postpones its iteration to an afterlife.

Speaker 1

And this is the moment where I I might, if I’m feeling really brave, try to get you. Who sings in here? You’re all, we can sing this, right? All right, who’s got perfect pitch? Anyone got an F? I have a pitch pipe. Of course, you do. Of course, you have a pitch pipe. Okay, so can you see? All right. All right, I’ll leave.

Speaker 2

Joy of heaven to earth come down. Fix in a don’t sing like Mormons, sing faster. Of thy faithful mercy’s crown Jesus, Thou art all compassion Joy and bended one There is its arms with our salvation And dumber three twenty third verse. Dishman Glor was led to be commanded. See the grains of village. Dimly change from government To glory till in happy day complain Till we can star crowns before me. Close in wonder, love and pray

Speaker 1

Thanks. I knew you could do it. So that’s Romanticism in a religious context, right? This moment of being lost in wonder, love and praise. That’s how we do religious excess of feeling, right? The title of my talk

Speaker 1

Well, let’s just say, religion calls this excess of feeling miraculous. It’s really interesting that Micah talked about miracles, because you can see where we’re going here. And but we religion calls the inexplicable miraculous and leaves it at that, right? The title of my talk comes from a poem of um Richard Wilbur, who was a professor at Wesley University for a long time, and I think this perfectly captures the impulse of religion to deal with excess as a miracle. It says: St. John tells how at Cana’s wedding feast, The water pots poured wine in such amount that by his sober count there were a hundred gallons at the least. It made no earthly sense unless to show How whatsoever love elects to bless Brims to a sweet excess That can without depletion overflow Which is to say, that what love sees is true. That this world’s fullness is not made but found. Life hungers to abound and pour out its plenty for such as you.

Speaker 1

Of course, as many transhumanist thinkers have been at pains to point out, religion is not just about what to do with a surfeit of happiness and love. It excuses all excesses of feeling, including anger, vengefulness, and lust, with reference to extra human beings. The devil made me do it, or worse, God told me to do it, as justification for slavery, sexism, even genocide. Religious attempts to cope with and suppress perceived excesses of feeling, or feelings that are unusual or difficult, have a long history of provoking tribalism, persecution, inquisition, and war.

Speaker 1

So these moments of feeling, of feeling escaping. Demand attention. And it seems to me that in preferring the rational over the emotional and preferring the secular to the religious, Among transhumanists, that we missed something important, that we elide questions that have to be answered somehow. And so far, at least no form, either literary or musical or artistic or scientific, has managed to describe the human experience in a way that doesn’t leave a remainder, a little bit left of life’s hunger to abound. It seems to me that whether we find that remainder frustrating or joyous will make an enormous difference in the rational systems and practices we try to create.

Speaker 1

Do we want to improve the human condition because we find death too fearsome to bear? Or is it because we believe that love can cast out that fear?

Speaker 1

This is the embarrassing point in my talk where I confess that I am so ignorant of the state of play in transhumanist thought that I initially turned to Wikipedia to map out a crash course for myself. One helpful page listed several works of fiction that might be considered transhumanist, along with helpful one-line summaries of their major plot lines or themes. Several of the suggested books were described as, quote, utopia or dystopia, depending on your point of view. Now far be it from me, the token humanist, to cast stones here, but that struck me as decidedly unscience-y. And actually, it provided a port of entry for me into this unfamiliar work. I was looking for ways that point of view might matter in transhumanist thought projects or experience or experiments.

Speaker 1

There’s a moment in Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, and I know you’re all going to tell me in the QA that that’s not really transhumanism. It’s okay. But there’s this moment where the protagonist is speaking with one of the overlords of the dystopia, and he reveals the fundamental rationale by which well-intentioned people had managed to make life a living hell for most of them. Population, particularly the female half of the population, but for most of everyone. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator of Fred has seduced her commander into an illicitly and dangerously humane relationship. They do things like playing Scrabble and reading me magazines together, and, most dangerous of all, just talking. Eventually she gets him to tell her about why and how the world changed from the one she remembered, which was roughly um Life in the eighties or nineties in a medium-sized post-feminist American city.

Speaker 1

And his chilling explanation is this You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. We thought we could do it better, but better never means better for everyone. It always means worse for some. And that, I think, is a fundamental dividing line between utopia and dystopia.

Speaker 1

Is life, is goodness, scarce or abundant? Everything depends on how we answer this question. Do we want to live longer and be smarter because we sense life’s hunger to abound, or because we are afraid of death? Are we trying to multiply joy or merely escape grief? It seems to me that Mormonism has particularly rich strains of both impulses the fear of death and the longing for life to continue in its overflowing goodness.

Speaker 1

We don’t need to look farther than the founding prophet Joseph Smith for an embodied lesson in how these feelings coexist even in the same consciousness. Samuel Brown has poignantly argued that earliest Mormonism was compelled and even obsessed with death. He quotes Joseph Smith at a funeral sermon for Adam Marx, saying, All men know that all men must die. What is the object of our coming into existence, then falling away to be here no more? This is a subject we ought to study more than any other, which we ought to study day and night. He expressed similar sentiments on many occasions. His funeral sermons were the locus of much of Joseph’s most elaborate theological work.

Speaker 1

Sometimes he seemed to want to keep the feelings evoked by the contemplation of death bounded and Some sort of rational proportion, faithful to the religious reasoning he was working out. So he said at another funeral: when we lose a near and dear friend, upon whom we have set our hearts, it should be a caution to us not to set our affections too firmly upon others, knowing that they may in like manner be taken from us. Our affection should be placed upon God and his work more intensely than our on our fellow beings. But then he contradicts himself again, right?

Speaker 1

Of course you all know the um place in the Doctrine of Covenants where he says that we should live together in love insomuch that we shall weep Leap for those who mourn. So, like most of us, Joseph wasn’t entirely able to pull off the equanimity he believed his religious convictions ought to provide.

Speaker 1

In yet another funeral sermon for Jesse Barnes, he said, When I heard of the death of our beloved brother Barnes, it would not have affected me so much if I had the opportunity of burying him in the land of Zion. I have said, Father, I desire to die here among the saints but if this is not thy will, and I go hence and die, wilt thou find some kind friend to bring my body back, and gather up my friends who have fallen in foreign lands, and bring them up hither, that we may all lie together. And may we contemplate these things so? Yes, if we learn how to live and how to die. When we lie down, we contemplate how we may rise in the morning, and it is pleasing for friends to lie down together, locked in the arms of love. to sleep and wake in each other’s embrace and renew their conversation.

Speaker 1

So they’re his his yearning for um the earthly, the physical, the The actual togetherness of friends sort of escapes the the notion that um that death Would take people away. He can’t ultimately bear it, even though he tries to. His human affection and care for his friends, and especially for his family. Constantly overflowed the bounds of the religious forms he was creating.

Speaker 1

See, for instance, these accounts of his feelings when he organized the church and baptized his own father. These are really beautiful, I hope. You can see that. So this is from Lucy MacSmith’s account of The founding of the church, and the part on the left is her unpublished manuscript, and then the version on the right is the one that she published. But look at the parts that don’t appear in the published version.

Speaker 1

She says, Joseph stood on the shore when his father came out of the water, and as he took him by the hand, he cried out, Oh, my God, I have lived to see my father baptized into the true Church of Jesus Christ. And he covered his face and wept and sobbed upon his father’s bosom like a child, wept aloud for joy, as Joseph of old when he became beheld his father coming up into the land of Egypt.

Speaker 1

And then in the diary of Joseph Knight, he says, There’s one thing I will mention that evening: that old Brother Smith and Martin Harris was baptized. Joseph was filled to the spirit to a great degree to see his father and Mr Harris that he had been with so much. He burst out with great with grief and joy, and seemed as though the world could not hold him. He went out into the lot and appeared to want to get out of sight of everybody, and would sob and cry and seem to be so full that he could not live. Oliver and I went after him and came to him, and after a while he came in But he was the most wrought upon that I ever saw any man. His joy seemed to be full. Um

Speaker 1

So, while Joseph would go on to try to systematize and codify the enduring familial frameworks for human affection, I love these accounts of the founding moment of the Mormon Church, already in his first attempt to make a religious system. And ordinances out of his revelatory experiences, Joseph’s complicated affection for his father completely overflows the bounds of decorum and even of language.

Speaker 1

Seems to me that Mormonism has, ever since that moment, existed in a constant struggle between the need to systematize and organize the church, create a religion. And the equally urgent need to imbue these reasoned and appropriate forms of religious expression with the kinds of transcendent, messy, sobbing joy that overwhelmed Joseph when he baptized his father.

Speaker 1

It seems to me that we are and have been for a few decades in a Mormon moment where the comfort of systems and rules and authority, as Christopher was talking about, has Mostly overtaken the longing for the uncontainable excess that also inheres in Mormonism’s optimistic insistence on human beings’ expansive and even godly potentialities.

Speaker 1

I find a delicious and sort of provocative irony in the ways that the Mormon Transhumanist Project, though itself eager and optimistic about technological and scientific modes of systematizing also might rediscover the exuberant and adventuresome spirit that animated these earliest Mormons of Mormonism. Like the Romantic poets trying to dismember the old forms in order to reanimate them, the ideas that you are pursuing can be constructive and invigorating to the old forms of Mormonism.

Speaker 1

But turning away for a second from Mormonism, I want to close with a practical example of how working in a framework of abundance might change real world events and practice. Many of you will have seen this news report in the last couple of days. This, I’m going to just read it from the Smithsonian Magazine’s blog. Why would scientists revive a thousand year old medical recipe for a foul smelling concoction? They suspected it could have very real benefits, and it turns out they were right. An Anglo Saxon brew kills methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. When microbiologist Freya Harrison chatted with Christina Lee, an Anglo-Saxon medievalist, she was intrigued by a nasty sounding recipe in Bald’s leech book, a thousand-year-old compendium of medical advice. and proportion and potions. The recipe uh was recommended to fight infected eyelash follicles. Um involves crop leek and garlic of equal quantities. Take wine and bullock skull mixed with the leek, let stand nine days in the brass vessel, etcetera. And so intrigued by this possibility, they actually made up a batch of this stuff and let it sit in the lab for nine days and then tried it out on some MRSA bacteria on mouse skin, and it killed about 90% of it, which is as good or better than the rate for the best Conventional antibiotics we have. Now, we often speak in university and medical and technological contexts of

Speaker 1

Of scarcity, right? We cut funding to arts and humanities in favor of STEM fields. And that seems like a pretty rational thing to do. There’s, you know, science is practical. They make stuff. And I love a lot of medievalists, but most of the time what they do seems as practical as an extended Monty Python sketch, right? Which is not to say that it’s useless. The world would be impoverished without them. We need the irrational and exuberant abundance of the useless, the silly, the impractical, the religious, the kiss that the child poet breathes out in her artless song.

Speaker 1

Both our religious striving towards salvation and our scientific, technological, transhumanist striving towards better lives here and now depend on whether or not we are able to believe that better can, in fact, mean better for everyone. that life hungers to abound and pour out its plenty such as pour its plenty out for such as you and for all of us, for the most expansive definition of us that we can conceive.

Speaker 1

Thanks, Anita. Questions and perceptions. Otherwise, I can just make you sing some more. That was fun. Yes.

Speaker 2

I’m just curious how long you’ve been with Dialbot and what the description

Speaker 1

I’ve struggled with dialogue over the last couple of years, but I want to do more achievements and Sure. I this is my seventh year of editing dialogue. I’m almost done. Boyd Peterson will take over next year. And subscriptions have have increased slightly, really slightly, over the last over that time period. which in an age when most print publications are are uh falling precipitously feels pretty good. Um I think the trouble that we and most print publications are facing is that people don’t read long form anything anymore. And the other interesting thing is that I think Dialogue and Sunstone and some of those independent publications for a long time served a function that was outside of their content, that was external to their content, and we didn’t really realize it. But what Dialogue said over and over and over again to people as it arrived in the mailbox was, you’re not alone. And that was really the most important content of Dialogue for decades, I think. And that message is now available online all the time, twenty four hours a day in whatever constellation or ideological flavor you would like it. And blogs just do that community function much better. So It’s been interesting to try to sort of find our way into those sort of short form conversations and try to say, well, yes, but You know, actually, this wheel you’re reinventing, someone else built a really good one about 25 years ago, and you could just go over here and read it. So, you know, I think we’re facing mostly the same struggles that most Print publications are. And I see it as a problem of form, not so much of ideology. I feel like ideologically, the church is that the climate in Mormonism is good for what We’re trying to do a dialogue and yeah, just uh one, two, three,

Speaker 4

There’s a message of that thinking from the paradigm of abundance rather than scarcity really appeals. We’ve talked about that a lot. We find that easily In just everyday life small group kind of thing, so dealing with talking with family and friends or talking Um however, as we uh think in local terms, uh someone earlier today And we just talked about how sort of a horizontal uh way of trying to progress globally and uh and if we were to all raise standards of living Globally to the United States of America and whatever it’s the natural resource. So how do you how do you uh deal with the tension between the how The fact that there is scarcely and living in a you know in a larger scale paradigm

Speaker 1

Oh, that’s easy. how to deal with the problem of earth’s scarce resources in in ten words or less, basically. So or and how that conflicts with this idea that there is abundance, right? You know, the Mormon way to say it is that there’s enough and to spare. I think that most of our greediest, most destructive consumption comes out of this sense that there’s not enough and that we better grab all we can and then some more, just in case. And it seems to me that, at least in my own life, when I really am operating, I mean, I don’t I’m not sure that I do this with physical resources. I’m thinking now more in terms of feeling, and but I think it works, I think it translates into the physical world. that when I’m uh less worried about getting more stuff and more grateful, I mean, the the paradigm of abundance, right, leads to a sense of gratitude and fullness. And when you have that sense of fullness, then you don’t need stuff to fill up the empty spaces. And I mean, that’s a really sort of facile gloss, but but I do think that that most of the sort of most destructive Western consumption comes from this sense of trying to fill a lack somehow with stuff that ultimately doesn’t fill fill it and that leads to more and more consumption. So just breaking out of that paradigm, I think, maybe would go a long ways.

Speaker 5

Um, I haven’t actually seen them like um not just on the double or something. I don’t know if the one And that is the concept.

Speaker 6

And also I invite Lincoln to say maybe this is actually what the mission of the MTA is. And other sort of one of the things that I really despair of, and I live in Northern California myself, is when I see, I’ll just call them, the Kursweils, who have the means and the determination to work on the technological underpinnings that could be the basis for this journey. Um very often I see personalities, that is the ones in the in the commanding positions with the most resource uh personalities that I are really far It spawns the question that you asked in the very beginning: is this a good thing? And so, most of the books that I’ve read, and I’ve read quite a few. when they come to saying, you know, and what will we do once we become immortal and data? And so On and one of the books that I recently read by Martine Rothblot says, Well, of course, there will still be movies after all. They’ll all be there. And so you’ll want to get together with your cyber friend information code packets evolving and watch movies. And what else do you like to do? If you like to play parts? Sure. We could do that. And she looks like a dozen things that I mean they’re you know, like going bowling, you know, and the stats. Yeah, that’s when you can come up. Well, it seems that the people who are working on it often have an emotional depth. And I don’t mean this insulting to anybody who’s experienced this, but which is close to autistic. There’s no there there. There’s a fascination with procedure. There’s a fascination with the process. There’s an assumption that we simply want more of this stuff, which my son is playing right now. hotel. And and so I is it the mission of groups like this to actually try to inform things that don’t pay? Because there is no shortage, believe me, of IT workers. People who say we need more, no, we’ve got a billion of them, and they all do the same thing. It’s called Apps. They live in Apps World, and they get funding for that. And we’re trying to find people who want to do things like spread emotional wealth. There’s no market for it, but we’re saying but that’s the best thing that we could do with this stuff. So are what we’re saying in this conference is that we’re announcing that that is the point and that we’re trying to find a way to leverage this minority viewpoint which doesn’t have a lot of power and money. Is that what this is, Kathy? Should it be Christine?

Speaker 1

I’m going to mostly defer to Lincoln because you are way out of my depth there. But I’ll just say that maybe the mission ought to be to Yeah. Um Great, great, okay.

Speaker 1

Um so um uh the question was about sort of The personalities, maybe leaders in the transhumanist movement, people who have the resources and the technical skill to make some of these things happen. seem sometimes to not have an emotionally or spiritually rich vision of what they’re trying to create, that they’re fascinated by the technological possibilities and sometimes lose sight of the humanist ones. Is that Fair. Okay. Um and I I think um that that maybe the the right approach to that question is not to try and proselytize to people whose temperaments are different than ours, but But to just make room for more for more kinds of people to do insane things like inviting me here to give this talk and getting me thereby to You know, watch a bunch of Kurtzweil TED talks and learn a little bit about this stuff and see if there’s a way in for other kinds of visions. Make sure that the medievalist is talking to the microbiologist. I want that.

Speaker 3

All right, there’s another one. Be be gentle.

Speaker 5

Um kind of focus on a lot of words we would use uh That’s the only place that word exists in the English language.

Speaker 3

So great.

Speaker 7

What is it you need to do something about just the standard value? And that sounds really like you’re saying, we need more of that romantic stuff. Because although it doesn’t matter anyway, I’m inviting all of that and sort of what might call anagogical attack, uh not some other Uh because we have no specific conceptual recording rate or the and and maybe that is the essence of Uh practice. Is it really something that actually um it doesn’t exist in the campus. Um so I guess I hate it. What is the romantic convergence? Uh romantics that what can be gained from our um Perspective here that was in the first few buttons or any space out of that change over here.

Speaker 1

Okay, so um let me try to restate that one. So um language is insufficient. We can’t really articulate the most important spiritual truths of our lives, like atonement. in language. We reached for words like infinite and incomprehensible, supernal, to describe this thing because we we can’t translate it into practical terms. And And I seemed to be arguing, and I think I was, that it’s good anyway to keep reaching for these terms. And why? So, what do we get from still trying to express to F the ineffable, as it were, right? To say the thing that can’t be said. Uh so um I think we

Speaker 1

Joseph Smith talked once about trying to escape the narrow, crooked prison of words. And he had this sense all the time, and I think in the Doctrine of Covenants, you read it all the time, that he’s sort of. He says over, you know, we saw these things, we can’t record them, we don’t understand in the Book of Mormon, you know, all these things that can’t be uttered. And But we have to try, right? I mean, that’s how we’re built as humans, so that’s why we do metaphors. That’s why Billy Collins laughs at the ways that we talk to our beloved. we still do it, and it means something to us. We like hearing those metaphors. And so I I think it’s just that that language is is all we have. I mean, we we can recogn and part of what um the Romantics offer that’s useful is to say language isn’t go you know, to to just acknowledge that the form the form won’t hold and that that we’re always aiming at something too big for us to manage.

Speaker 1

I actually think that maybe the Baroque is a better example. You know, there are these moments, and I here I’m going to be lost for words too, but many of you probably know this experience of Listening, or I have it most often when playing Bach, where it’s a perfect fugue. There’s nothing outside of the form, and yet all of a sudden. there’s this space that opens up in that melody that just um it and I don’t know how to describe it other than that, a sort of space that happens between between the bars, between the rigid form, that there’s just suddenly this sense of expansion. And I think that’s why we keep reaching for better words to describe what we’re trying to do. We’re hoping that eventually will come on the form that that escapes itself and lets us feel that space in the form.

Speaker 1

But yeah, I sorry, I don’t know. Now there’s really thoughts that it really goes beyond what it is Right. Yeah, that we need more more forms, an abundance of of forms. And eventually, we get something like what we need.