A Brief History of the Mormon Transhumanist Association

Speaker 1

and board member of the Christian Transhumanist Association. He formulated the New God argument, the logical argument That is popular among religious transhumanists. Lincoln is CEO at Thribus, a human enhancement company, and is married with Dorothy Vancry Khanja. Would you pronounce that for me again? Vonkrikong. And they have three children. Lincoln.

Lincoln Cannon

So I get the honor of telling you a little bit. I’m doing a seven right now. I’m told. I’m going to up this to a 10 in just a second. I get the honor of talking to you this afternoon about the history of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. And as anybody who’s studied history knows, that’s impossible to do with much. Accuracy in any way, let alone when you need to do it in 10 or 15 minutes. So, what I’m going to tell you, it may be less history and more story, so take it with a grain of salt. And if there are inaccuracies, As I go along, then most of you won’t know better, so that will be okay. And those of you who do know better probably like me, or you wouldn’t be here at this point, so you’ll probably kind of roll with it.

Lincoln Cannon

So I was recently online. and uh got caught in a conversation where somebody heard about the Mormon Transhumanist Association for the first time and they thought, wow, that’s really cool and they tweeted something to a prominent transhumanist whose name is um up there for you. Anders Sandberg, he uh was one of the original authors of the Transhumanist Declaration, which most secular transhumanists have adopted. Years as a good representation of what transhumanism stands for. He was mentioned in the tweet He heard about the Mormon Transhumanist Association and this was his reply. By transhumanist standards, the Mormon Transhumanist Association is an ancient institution. And for those of you familiar with the transhumanist Movement, he’s right. Transhumanist organizations have a tendency to not last very long. They get swept into existence. And then things evolve, transhumanists love evolution, and then they die like things do in evolution. And it happens all the time among transhumanist organizations. Not many survive long, not many grow very large. And the Mormon Transhumanist Association is one of those that has survived and has grown, and it is by far the largest religious transhumanist association organization in the world. Despite the fact that Mormonism is not the largest religion in the world. And despite the fact that people of other religions and other spiritual movements have tried to get Transhumanist organizations going on behalf of their faith or on behalf of their spirituality, they just haven’t worked as well. They haven’t grown as fast, they haven’t caught as much interest. And we’ve heard some of the reasons for that this morning. I’m not going to cover that. Mormonism does have a unique relationship in many ways with transhumanism.

Lincoln Cannon

So, I’m going to tell you a story about How we got to 2017 and share with you some of the events that I think of as important that have shaped the association over the years. Starting in 2006, when the association was founded. What we here is a picture of the 14 founders of the association. And you’ll notice that one of them’s not like the others. And some of you might be thinking that I’m talking about Cherie, I’m not. But yes, there was one woman among our founders, and that’s awesome. But that’s not the one I’m going to draw most of your attention to right now. The one I want you to notice, in case you haven’t already, is in the bottom right corner. One of the founders of our association actually very really was Pseudonymous. He or she, as the case may have been. Did not want to be publicly known, and so used the name Martin Wood. That name is on the list of our founders to this day. And although Martin Wood did not use that picture as his or her avatar, that picture is symbolic of where Martin Wood comes from. And if you want to know more about that story, because I don’t have time to tell that right now. You should talk to Joseph West. Where are you, Joey? Right there. Raise your hand, Tolly. Look at there’s Joseph West. He’s up one of the founders there up on the right. He can tell you more about the story, about why there’s a Spock with a beard guy in the bottom right corner who went by the name Martin Woods. So, those were the 14 founders. Many of those founders are here today. Some of them have spoken, others are yet to speak.

Lincoln Cannon

One of the first things the founders of the association did is we put together a website because that’s what transhumanists do when they start new organizations. They put up a website. And often it doesn’t go much beyond that, which is why there’s so many dead transhumanist organizations. So we put up a website. You can see this is actually a cool screenshot. I love this screenshot of our original website. Because it captured one of the things that has always been a fun, exciting, inspiring topic of conversation among Mormon transhumanists. and that is the relationship between technology and resurrection. Yes, many Mormon transhumanists are audacious enough to believe. That God expects us to figure out how to use technology to raise dead people from the dead. That sounds totally crazy to a lot of people. And I don’t blame them. But if you want to talk about that with seriousness, go find a Mormon transhumanist. And odds are you’ll find one, one out of two, that will love this idea and talk your ear off about it. Especially if they’ve ever worked at Ancestry. com. We go crazy over this.

Lincoln Cannon

After putting up this website, could you move that? Banner over a little bit blocking the hose for it. Thank you very much. Now I’m in an eight and a half.

Lincoln Cannon

All right, so after we put together the website, we thought, okay, well, we need to get more formal about this, and we put together A Constitution and we adopted the Constitution, and the two most important things in that Constitution were the Transhumanist Declaration Which Anders Sandberg and other prominent secular transhumanists had already put together years before, we adopted that. That’s one of the positions we stood for. We also put together the Mormon transhumanist affirmation. It’s pictured up here on the screen. And that was our way of expressing in more Mormon-y terms some transhumanist ideas, the things that inspired and motivated us. And in summary, what really moved us as the founders of the organization is this desire to express our faith more practically, more substantially. With more action, with less superstition, with less hesitation and apathy or hands-offness or passiveness. We thought that to be a Mormon To be a Christian is something we should immerse ourselves in in action with our full hearts, our full minds, our full strength. And if we’re going to use our full minds and our full strength, that means science. Full mind. That means Technology, full strength. Without those things, our discipleship felt inadequate. And so we set out. To put together an organization that would advocate these ideas, share these ideas, and hopefully make them more popular. And they have become somewhat more popular. There’s a lot more people in here than 14, and then a lot more people that identify as Mormon transhumanists around the world now than uh 14.

Lincoln Cannon

So, after we put together the Constitution that we adopted those things, we went to the World Transhumanist Association, which was the largest organization of secular transhumanists in the world at the time. They’ve since changed their name to Humanity Plus. They do still exist. They’re one that has managed to survive somewhat over the years. They’ve had their ups and downs. And we said, hey, we want to affiliate with you. And they go, Mormon transhumanist, that is the weirdest thing we’ve ever heard of. And they were right, it was pretty weird. We talked to them, we negotiated with them, and This is a picture of the original board of directors of the World Transhumanist Association. Some of them were still on the board when we approached them about affiliating with us. Notably, you’ll see the third from the left over here, that’s Nick Bostrom. Very popular, transhumanist, both generally, but particularly among Mormon transhumanists. There’s a lot of High esteem for Nick Bostrom’s work. And if you go over to the right side of the table at the very back, you’ve got James Hughes, who’s popular among Mormon transhumanists. He’s spoken at one of our conferences. And then coming forward, the closest two on the right are Julio Prisco and Mike Latora, who both ended up later joining the Mormon Transhumanist Association, although Neither is Mormon. One of them is a Buddhist, the other I have a story about later, but at the time was atheist. And we’ll talk about that in a few minutes. So we affiliated with them eventually, and that was really cool. They debated it, they voted on it, they chose, yeah, we’re going to affiliate with these guys. They are strange, but they’re transhumanists. They seem authentically so, so why not? And we did it and we affiliated.

Lincoln Cannon

After that, One of the first things we did is we decided, okay, now that we’ve got a constitution, we’ve got these ideas, we want to go share these ideas. The first people we wanted to share these ideas with, were Mormons, other Mormons. We thought, we’re going to go tell other Mormons about these really cool ideas that we’ve got. And the place that we chose to do that first was Sunstone in Salt Lake City. They held annual conferences up there. So we worked really hard. We made Carl Youngblood really mad because we kept him up all night long and away from our camping trip one summer. We actually had a camping trip plan and we decided we can’t go on our camping trip because we have to finish this paper for the conference that’s coming up. And he’s never forgiven me for it. You can ask him. And. And so we put together this paper and we went to Sunstone and we presented it. And it was really interesting what happened. We had a lot of people that came to our presentation going, wow, those are really cool ideas. How do I get involved? And the association started growing. So we did that in August of 2006.

Lincoln Cannon

Late in 2006, we started the first of what we might consider our humanitarian projects. This is Rosetta at home. We started telling each other: hey, we’re about more than talk. We want to do some things to help people, to use technology to help people. And we thought, well, we don’t have many resources to do that. What can we do? Various, I think it was maybe Carl and Bryant Smith. I don’t remember exactly whose idea it was, but we came up with this idea: hey, we’re going to put together a Rosetta at home team. Basically what this is, is this allows people all over the world to contribute spare cycles on their computers to calculating protein folding, which can be used in medical research. And we ended up becoming one of the best contributors to this project in the world. I think we’re in the 90-something percentile of contributors to this project as of today. Anyway, so that’s something early on that demonstrated, hey, we wanted to do more than talk. We wanted to act.

Lincoln Cannon

End of the first year, we doubled in size. It was huge. We went from 14 members to 29 members. It was amazing.

Lincoln Cannon

2007. 2007 began with us publishing an article in Sunstone Magazine. It was the cover article. It was called Transfiguration, and it introduced a broader set of Mormons to the ideas of Mormon transhumanism. and how the ideas of transhumanism were complementary to the ideas of Mormonism, that started attracting some more attention. And then we decided, hey, well, we’ve taken the good news of Mormon transhumanism to the Mormons. It’s time we take the good news to the transhumanists. And what better place to do that than in the virtual world of Second Life? So we sent our virtual missionaries into the virtual world of Second Life, and we started giving presentations on Mormon transhumanism in Second Life. And this is. This is Virtual Me on the left giving a presentation about Mormonism, teaching transhumanists what Mormonism is in this second life world. We also thought, hey, this newfangled Facebook thing, we better start a group there. We didn’t know whether it would go anywhere or not. Today we have nearly a thousand members in our Facebook group, so it did end up going somewhere. And by the end of that second year, we had 48 members in the Mormon Transhumanist Association. We’re not going to take over the world anytime soon, but we’re growing.

Lincoln Cannon

2008. In 2008, we thought, okay, well, we’re meeting on Facebook. Maybe we should also try to meet in person, see each other face to face. I mean, Transhumanism is cool and all. Maybe we’ll get mind uploaded eventually. But in the meantime, it’s nice to meet real people in the flesh from time to time. So we started setting up meetup groups. The original meetup groups for the Mormon Transhumanist Association were actually held in Salt Lake. I think Joey or his brother Andrew organized them. We called them a roundtable. And a lot of us from Utah Valley would drive up there. But it turned out over time that the highest concentration of our membership ended up being in Utah County. So over time, we moved them back to Utah County. And eventually we made this cool meetup website. To kind of help structure that. We have a large meetup that happens every month now in Utah County. I think there’s like 90 members in the meetup group, but we usually get between 10 and 20 people at the meetup.

Lincoln Cannon

And then we had this really audacious idea: hey, we’re taking the good news of Mormon transhumanism to the virtual world of Second Life. Maybe we should set up a presence there, like have our board meetings there. And who knows what kind of cool stuff can happen in this spirit world Well, we did that. We rented some space on a Mormon island. There is a Mormon island in Second Life. It’s still there. Was at the time, still is there today. And on this Mormon island, they have created some virtual temples. They’ve created some virtual high-rises for offices. We went and we rented the top. Of the high-rise, the high-rise was called Inspired Technologies. We rented the very top floor of it to have our board meetings. And we thought, hey, we can reach out to other Mormons here in this virtual world. And we started doing it. And within two months, the owners of the Mormon Island and Second Life came to us. I’m at nine and three quarters. Came to us, and they said, You guys are bad Mormons. We thought, well, why are we bad Mormons? And they told us, Because you’re affiliated with Sunstone and attending Sunstone symposiums is incompatible with having an LDS temple recommend. Can we talk about this? No, we’ve made up our minds. They kicked us off their island. Yes. The narrow-minded second life virtual Mormons kicked Mormon transhumanists. Oh, and they also said, and your name implies that you have a relationship with the LDS church that we don’t think you really have. Wait a second, you call yourself the Second Life Mormons? Yes. You don’t see the irony in this. Apparently not. Anyway, they kicked us off of their virtual island, and things in Second Life kind of started tapering off from there. We didn’t do so much there after that.

Lincoln Cannon

August 2008 was the first time we presented the New God argument. This is a popular argument among religious transhumanists generally, but particularly among Mormon transhumanists. It’s an argument for faith in God. Based on contemporary trends in both science and technology. So it’s not based in religious principles, it’s based in secular science and technology trends. And from those trends, argues that you should trust that superhumanity Already exists, is more compassionate than we are, and created our world. You should trust that. And if you’re interested in learning more about that, and you should be because it’s a really cool idea, you should go to newgodargument. com and you can learn all about it. End of the third year, 67 members. 2009, we became involved in the first conference that we ever sponsored.

Lincoln Cannon

This was held at Claremont Graduate University in California. It was put together by Richard Bushman, and we got called in to help, and it was a cool event. Terrell Gibbons was the keynote speaker there. End of that year, 83 members, so still growing at a pretty gradual pace. 2010

Lincoln Cannon

We began that year with another problem. So, not only did the Second Life Mormons want to get rid of us, but it turned out there were some transhumanists that didn’t like us either. And so those transhumanists, who were rather anti-religious, happened for a short period of time to gain control of the World Transhumanist Association, or what it had become. Named as, at this point, was Humanity Plus. And they decided when they heard about the affiliation that they had with us, horror of horrors, how can we be affiliated with religious transhumanists? They’re insane people anyway. They’re obviously stupid because they’re religious. They decided to terminate the affiliation. We were disappointed, but we were undaunted. And elections came up for the World Trans or for the Humanity Plus Board of Directors. Several of us, many of us actually, were voting members of that organization, and we made it an issue in the vote about who we would vote for, about whether they thought that they would The new members would affiliate with religious transhumanists or not, and we voted in people who supported us to the extent we could. And we talked to the existing board members that We were on the board already to figure out what their positions were. And it turned out that there was just a kind of a minority of board members in the organization that were there for a temporary time in leadership that didn’t like us. New board members came into place, a new chairman came into place, and within a few months, we were actually affiliated again with that organization. So, unlike the Second Life. Mormons, the humanity plus transhumanists recognized the error of their ways in a very short period of time, and we remain affiliated with them to this day.

Lincoln Cannon

Later in that year, we helped sponsor the Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference at University of Utah. Had two great keynote speakers there. One of them was James Hughes, who was one of the founders of the World Transhumanist Association. And the other one, this is an awesome picture, the other one was Max Moore, who he is the second from the front, or third from the front. Max Moore is kind of like the founding father of modern transhumanism, a very influential person in the secular transhumanist movement. And yes, that is Max Moore sitting in LDS Church General Conference. With Brent and a few other members of the Mormon Transhumanist Association that aren’t here right now, but Brent, wait, Brent is here. Brent. And Max have something in common. They’re both atheists. What they don’t have in common, though, is that Brent is a Mormon atheist. Yes, that kind of weirdness does exist in our association, too. If you want to hear more about it, go talk with Brent. He would love to talk with you about it. End of 2010, we were up to 104 members, so still our gradual growth.

Lincoln Cannon

2011. One of my favorite things that happened in 2011 is a fellow that you’ve probably heard of before. His name’s in the upper left-hand corner, Sam Harris. He’s one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the new atheists. The guys with horns, the evil, evil atheists. They’re not evil, right, Brent? We love atheists in the MTA. We get along just fine with some of them. Anyway, some of them don’t like us very much, but in this particular case, Sam Harris, although he did not directly say so, appears to have come across the New God argument and asks this question on his blog post. You can go and read it, and it’s still up today. Should we be Mormons in the Matrix? He says in this blog post that he came across an argument about God that he wasn’t sure how to get over. How to refute. And it was the simulation argument, is what he refers to directly. And then, of course, he associates Mormons with it, which makes me suspect. And I asked him, but he never responded to me. Whether this was his response to the new God or Mr. So if you’re interested, go to his blog, or you can just Google it, Sam Harris, Should We Be Mormons in the Matrix, and you can read about Sam Harris’s take. On the New God argument, although he does not reference it directly. He does reference Mormons directly, and he does reference the simulation argument directly. Whether or not this was a direct response to the New God argument or not, I don’t know. He didn’t reply to my email. Maybe he will someday. End of that year, 2011, we were up to 133 members.

Lincoln Cannon

2012, we published most of this book from Mormon Transhumanist Association members. This is a book that That resulted from the conference we had with Richard Bushman, Terrell Givens, and most of the speakers of that conference were Mormon transhumanists. Most of the essays in this book were written by Mormon transhumanists. You can get this book on Amazon. com today if you’d like. Then, for the first time ever, we held the first conference of the Mormon Transhumanist Association in 2012. I was privileged to be one of our keynote speakers for that conference. The other keynote speaker for that conference was Julio Prisco, who you saw was on the board of directors of the World Transhumanist Association, and who at that time was an atheist. He came out at our conference in 2012 as a believer, no longer an atheist. And he has. Transformed himself over time into one of the leading religious transhumanists in the world. He lives in Europe. And he is a A major proponent of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, a major supporter of it, and a close friend. And it was one of the highlights, really, for me over the years was relating with him and learning about the things that have transitioned him from being kind of, you know, an atheist transhumanist into a religious transhumanist. That’s inspired me a lot and I’ve learned a lot from him. Consider him a good friend.

Lincoln Cannon

That year, we also established our YouTube channel. It is an awesome YouTube channel. If you’ve not looked at the MTA YouTube channel, you should. Tons of excellent resources there, much inspiration, much things to many things to learn about. Good stuff. Go look at our YouTube channel. By the end of that year, you’ll notice something different happened. we started growing much faster. I don’t know exactly what caused it. Maybe it was the book that came out. Maybe it’s that we started having our own conferences. Maybe it was that God saw that Julio Prisco became a religious transhumanist, and time to kick off the millennium. I don’t know what it was, but whatever it was, we started growing faster. 2013, we started extending our humanitarian efforts a little bit more.

Lincoln Cannon

We set up a Kiva micro lending team for the Mormon Transhumanist Association. You can see that today we’ve loaned nearly $10,000 in micro loans. We also had our second annual conference. Our keynotes at that were Richard Bushman and Aubrey deGrey, who is well known for being an advocate of radical life extension. And later in that year, we also sponsored a lecture by Amit Goswami at University of Utah. He’s kind of an interesting guy. You can watch his presentation if you like. All of these presentations are available on our YouTube channel. End of that year, our faster growth rate was continuing. In 2013, we had 365 members. 2014, our next conference, we had Adam Miller.

Lincoln Cannon

Natasha Vita Moore, the wife of Max Moore, who you saw, who was also a speaker at another one of our conferences, spoke at this conference. And we also sponsored a panel discussion between Mormons and atheists in Salt Lake City that year, which was an interesting event to attend. There was lots of cat calling between Mormons and atheists in this. Packed room. It was actually really an interesting experience. And then we also sponsored that year a conference on religion and transhumanism in California. With some secular transhumanists, and that was a cool experience. Ted Peters here is a well-known theologian who talks a lot about transhumanism. He was our keynote speaker at that conference.

Lincoln Cannon

In June 2014, we published the only official position of the Mormon Transhumanist Association besides the Transhumanist Declaration and the Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation. Those are official positions of the association. But this year, the board of directors of the association felt strongly that we should take another official position. And this was in response to the period of time when John DeLynn and Kate Kelly were excommunicated by the LDS Church. we put out a statement about what we felt was the importance of reconciliation within the Mormon community. And if you want to read the details about our thoughts on the importance of reconciliation, I invite you to go check that out on our website.

Lincoln Cannon

We also upped our game on the humanitarian front. We started funding various humanitarian projects in Africa. This is my favorite one. This is a cool picture. of the Mormon Transhumanist Association Science and Literacy Center in Africa. We helped them lease this space for a year to teach children science and literacy. And stuff like this is where some of the money that you donate goes when you donate to the Mormon Transhumanist Association. End of that year, 478 members.

Lincoln Cannon

2015 started that year with a great conference again. We had Christine Haglund speak. We also had Ralph Merkel, well known for cryptography and cryonics, things like that. Fascinating, really funny guy. He gave a great presentation. And this was the first year, first time that we ever had a peer-reviewed publication on Mormon transhumanism. This was published. in Theology and Science, the Journal of Theology and Science. What is Mormon Transhumanism? It’s available. Also, actually you can get it for free if you go to my blog. But if you want to pay for it, you can go in the ordinary places to get peer-reviewed journals.

Lincoln Cannon

Chris mentioned this earlier. Several of our leadership participated at the Sanford Conference on Transhumanism in the Church, where we spoke and interacted with mainstream Christians on the subject of transhumanism. Although I wasn’t at this conference, I heard that we pretty much blew them away. They were surprised how profoundly Christian we are while also being authentically transhumanist. I think they learned a lot by interacting with the Mormon transhumanists that were there. And of that year, 562 members.

Lincoln Cannon

2016, this is last year, we modified the Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation. We added in some things that we thought. Were implicit in where we were, but we wanted to make them more explicit. And so we added in some commentary on the Gospel of Christ. which is fundamental to what motivates us. A lot of people who aren’t aware of what motivates the Mormon Transhumanist Association become confused about what the role is of the Gospel of Christ in relation to Mormon Transhumanism. And I often find myself reminding them that it’s fundamental to what we’re doing. It is the driving force behind what we’re doing. We feel like we are being better disciples of Christ. As I described earlier, by using our minds and our strength to their fullest as expressed in science and technology. To console and to heal and to raise each other up together. So we wanted to make that more explicit. We did. We modified the Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation to include it.

Lincoln Cannon

We also wanted to point out that we don’t insist on any one narrow interpretation of that. We want to be an ecumenical organization. So we added something that made that statement. That’s number two. And then at the end of the Mormon Transhumanist Affirmation, we added a statement that is basically a summary of Joseph Smith’s grand fundamental principles of Mormonism. If you want to learn more about those, Don, raise your hand. We have an expert on that subject. Don has an awesome story about this. He too was, he left Mormonism for a period of time. Thought he might be able to be an atheist. Turns out he was wrong. He wasn’t able to do that. He tried another religion for a while. Turns out that was a bad choice, too. Not a bad choice, a learning choice. He came back to Mormonism eventually, but he has written. A superlative article on the history of Joseph Smith’s Grand Fundamental Principles of Mormonism. And basically, there’s three important things that he pointed out that Joseph Smith claimed. were part of an unfinished reformation that we’re all involved in in Mormonism. And that and those are encapsulated in this last one. The first one of them was friendship. The second was truth. Let it come from whence it may. It doesn’t just have to come from Mormons. And third, Relief, sending relief to each other, giving relief to each other. We wanted to incorporate those things into the basic principles on which Mormon transhumanism is founded. So we did that.

Lincoln Cannon

We also had a change in leadership. We decided that it was time to make a change, that this association is not about any one person leading. The association, it’s about the ideas and the sharing of those ideas and about the community and the relationships and the possibilities that that community and relationships make possible. So we thought it was time to make a change and the board of directors appointed Chris Bradford to be our new president. And you’ve heard from him this morning. And then we had a great conference. We had Rosalind Welch at the conference. We had Eric Steinhardt as our other transhumanist keynote. Many of you were at that conference last year. It was a great conference.

Lincoln Cannon

And then something really cool happened. The New Yorker gave us some excellent attention, shared Mormon transhumanism with many more people than had ever heard of it before. We were on the front of the technology section of The New Yorker for over a week. We were the trending article there. Really cool article. It’s not super long. Go read it if you haven’t read it.

Lincoln Cannon

And then at the end of last year, we made another very important change to leadership. We brought our new CEO on board, Blair Osler. And Blair has been tasked with growing the organization, diversifying the organization, strengthening the organization, basically doing everything that the rest of us just yap about. And she’s already off to an amazing start. So that’s how 2016 ended, and here we are in 2017.

Lincoln Cannon

I’m happy to be here with you. I’ve been inspired by what I’ve heard this morning. I can only imagine that’s going to continue to be the case this afternoon. Thank you for being here.