Panel discussion with Ralph Merkle, Kristine Haglund and Lincoln Cannon

Speaker 1

All right, so the goal of this last session of the day is to give you guys an opportunity to ask questions that may interest you. There’s three of us up here. One of us has just finished sharing his incredible transhumanist credentials. Earlier in the day, one of us has shared her incredible Mormon credentials, and I might try to interpret between the two in answering some of the questions that you guys might have. So we encourage you now to ask. Those burning questions in your soul, whether they’re theological questions, whether they’re literature or historicity questions, whether they’re hard questions about technology. You’ve got a Mormon, a transhumanist, and a Mormon transhumanist up here, and we’re going to do our best to not look completely stupid as we try to answer your tough questions.

Speaker 2

So speak for yourself.

Speaker 3

I’m not promising anything.

Speaker 2

We’ll start over here. I have a question for oh, sorry. I have a question. I know you presented on nanotechnology, but b based on your background in cryptography, I have a question about that. In the current Internet, we have a problem where we have privacy issues, we have problem of you know, people being able to be anonymous and then, you know, engage in bad behavior and people that are acting in good behavior, their whole world’s exposed and they suffer from that. Is there something with. cryptography that you would see as a way of managing privacy so that people are protected, at the same time enabling things like distributed consensus algorithms, blockchain, where you could Also, validate and or differentially disclose their behavior. I know it’s a it

Speaker 4

There are long and complicated answers, but the simplest answer is no. Privacy is not really a technical thing. It is more a sort of a social consensus and something that involves governance and involves the software and is the software reliable. It involves a whole bunch of really complicated stuff. That said, there is at least some reason for hope. The recent work with Bitcoin Bitcoin itself is simply a currency and is Okay, it’s mildly interesting. But the Bitcoin algorithm, the way in which Bitcoin functions, is very interesting because it enables any distributed algorithm to be implemented the same way Bitcoin was And any distributed algorithm could be a corporation or a government or whatever you want to implement. And that starts to get interesting, and people are exploring that space of possibilities now. And there might be some ways of providing privacy or at least guarantees of assurances in the governance space. That we currently can’t provide or don’t effectively provide.

Speaker 1

That’s about as close as I can get to an answer Corner him at dinner. Other questions?

Speaker 5

Off of that, but involving a little bit of theology, too. So there’s this idea that at some point in the future, our sins will be shouted from the rooftops, as in everybody’s going to have no privacy basically about what. What they’ve done. And I’ve sort of observed on the internet that we’re voluntarily moving that way, or sometimes involuntarily. And it has, I think, two potentials. One, People get their lives ruined or embarrassed, but on the other hand, sometimes you find out that everybody has certain bad tendencies or It becomes easier to understand other people, maybe a little less embarrassing the things that you might do wrong in your own life. So I wonder if privacy is really actually going to be a concern in the long run from a theological standpoint, or if uh we might find that it’s a better world when privacy goes away, if it goes away completely.

Speaker 4

Well, the problem is that privacy is more likely to go away partially in the sense that The government will know everything and we won’t. And that would be awkward in a number of ways. if gov if privacy goes away completely so that everyone knows everything, that actually would be a workable world. Yes. your dirty laundry would be out there, but so would everyone else’s. And the trade-off of no longer having to worry about whether someone else is up to something that might be damaging to you might be worth it. Usually today, privacy is a code word for I don’t want my socially unacceptable behavior to be made public, even though my socially unacceptable behavior is Yes, it’s socially unacceptable, but very likely it’s, you know, one of those victimless crimes. I mean, there are a whole list of such things. It doesn’t take much imagination. To rattle off a number of things that people do on a fairly widespread basis that cause immense problems, particularly if you’re running for political office. That if nobody knows, there’s no particular problem. But if people know, there are huge problems. So what about all of those issues? What about what happens when they come out? Maybe we become a more tolerant society if everybody knows everything about everyone. That’s the hopeful scenario. The reverse would be maybe we come very uptight and when everybody knows everything about everyone, we have a lot of people who get really hurt really badly. And I don’t know which way it’ll go because that is not a technology question, so I haven’t studied those issues and can’t address them effectively.

Speaker 6

I think theologically that’s interesting maybe because if you take away social shame as a control mechanism, you actually enable real virtue, right? I mean, suddenly people have to behave well out of devotion to God or religious conviction or whatever instead of fear of social approbation. You know, maybe it’s an interesting theological experiment.

Speaker 4

I personally would like to see is a more relaxed set of rules. it is no longer illegal to do a variety of things. Those go away, but the smaller set of rules that remain are actually more fully enforced.

Speaker 1

Next question.

Speaker 7

A joke first, but apologies, but you kind of set me up. So if we didn’t have any privacy, you said it would make it difficult for people to run for office, maybe then nobody would run for office. And yeah. Well, we’re already seeing that.

Speaker 4

I think there is a problem, though. How do I put it? I mean, we need government. Government has to be done effectively and it has to be done fairly. And we see a number of instances where incompetent government, in fact, has been hurting people. So how do you get competent governance? I think competent governance is probably the single most important problem of this century. Let me put it to you this way. Everyone here, most people here, want to have these really long lifespans, right? How long does a government last before there’s civil war or an unnecessary war in which lots of people die. How long do you think your lifespan is going to be if there are governments running around which every 50 years or so get involved in some big large scale rumpus, which is just silliness. I mean, look at the United States. We’ve had a major civil war. We’ve been involved in a number of wars, and some of them people say, yeah, we had to do that. And others people say, you know, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. If you want a long, happy life, maybe we have to work on this governance thing so that we have governments that are going to be stable and make sensible decisions. over correspondingly long life lifespans or correspondingly long time frames. So that’s something to think about. How do we get governments that are stable and act sensibly over time spans that are similar to the lifespans that we aspire to.

Speaker 6

Artificial intelligence, presumably

Speaker 4

That is one of the answers. That there are issues there to be worked, but that is one of the answers. Actually, the whole Bitcoin algorithms is another one that looks interesting.

Speaker 8

You implied it during your speech today that the social governance problem, someone’s going to turn up the heat on your cryogenic machine. during the next hundred years, just because they think it’s a bad idea for you to be hanging around that long. And almost everything we’ve talked about today, it’s it seems to come back to this. uh the nexus of technology always being involved in the human or divine purposes that are in conflict. And and it’s a very interesting not with necessarily technologists, but But between each other, that causes these conflicts that have ramifications for someone. I want to ask, one of the big themes today was on emergence. Whitehead’s idea that One in one always equals three. There’s always the synthetic creativity, the new, that comes. It seems to me that the question for us theologically on this whole question: if everything is known, All of us are totally, our histories are naked to everyone else. We’re all tuned into the machine. We get it. If there’s still emergence, the only thing that really is interesting is what we still don’t know, is what you’re going to do next. What you decide. In this creative moment, to do next. And so it will not be so much, in my mind, an issue of what we’ve done in the past, but the amazing fact that there are billions of us out there who are creative agents still Who, in relation to each other, could either create a lot of interesting stuff or a lot of trouble. And we don’t quite know what’s coming, even though we’re living forever, right? So to speak. So, I just wanted to put that out there as the theological idea in Mormonism. I think that’s what heaven’s all about. In other words, that’s what it’s all about. If there’s going to be another war in heaven, we might as well. Get on with it right now. I mean, that idea is there are deep possibilities of freedom even among the gods. And we can’t predict it in accurate ways in advance.

Speaker 1

Christine, I’m interested in your perspective on that. Randall is suggesting that God doesn’t know everything. What do you think most Mormons would say? And what do you personally think about that?

Speaker 6

You’re asking me to reveal a personal heresy. I think that most Mormons think That God’s foreknowledge is somehow complete, that He knows what we will do. And my personal heresy is that God’s knowledge is Works sort of like a big choose your own adventure book. Am I the only person old enough to remember those?

Speaker 9

I do.

Speaker 6

But so I think God Knows at every point that we make a choice. He can see all the rest of the possible adventures that follow from that choice. But I don’t think he knows which choice we’re going to make. Not the only ones.

Speaker 4

Would he know even if I deliberately randomized my choice? Is there any possibility of a mechanism that is randomized to the extent that God would not know what the outcome of the random event was? Is there any source of randomness that God is not aware of? Anything?

Speaker 6

I don’t know.

Speaker 4

Okay.

Speaker 6

I mean. I’d like to think so. I I mean, I’d sort of like to think that God can be surprised.

Speaker 4

Well, if there’s any source of randomness that God cannot predict, then. Obviously, then I can make random choices because I just take that source of randomness and use it deliberately to make a random choice.

Speaker 9

Yeah, I don’t think it would be some want to hear your answer to that question as well.

Speaker 1

My answer to the question? Oh, to the question I asked? about randomness? So I I suspect that there are things that God does not know. You know, one of the things that in fact I’ve I’ve enjoyed thinking about Is that evolution itself may be such an algorithm that God cannot know any faster than it computes itself. and that the world in which we live is a genuinely creative endeavor. That the that there may be a shape to the outcome, a general shape, some constraints, an environmental Molding, but that within it there’s all kinds of surprising flourishing possible, and there’s very real suffering risks possible as well. And this gets back to the Mormon notion of the premortal war in heaven. This idea on the one hand of One of the gods, or would-be gods, or Satan, depending on the perspective you want to take, suggested, you know what, this plan is too risky because there will be real losses. And then, on the other hand, the other that we recognize as Christ, suggesting it’s worth it. The real risks are worth it because genuinely new creators may be produced by this process. I do think there are things that God does not know.

Speaker 4

Well, that would certainly be an answer for why is there evil. And basically, if you look around and you say, we exist and we are the result of an evolutionary process. And there was no other way to get to humans other than allowing the evolutionary process to play out. Then what’s your choice? Your choice is either, no, we will not allow the evolutionary process to play out, in which case there would be no humans, or Okay, we’ll allow the evolutionary process to play out with all of its mess.

Speaker 1

Are you a Mormon transhumanist?

Speaker 4

I’m just a transhumanist.

Speaker 1

So that actually.

Speaker 4

I’m really interested in the sort of the. Questions because this is a classic problem.

Speaker 1

And I think Mormonism has an excellent answer for that question.

Speaker 4

But the moment you allow God to be finite, then suddenly it admits of. a variety of answers.

Speaker 1

Yeah, we can optimize for thriving, and that entails real risk.

Speaker 10

Yeah. So I have a question for both Christine and Ralph. And maybe I can phrase it in two different ways, and you can choose which you prefer. One of them would be What can you imagine would persuade you to identify as a Mormon transhumanist? The negative of that would be what would you say is the current biggest block or barrier to Identifying as a Mormon transhumanist. Thanks.

Speaker 4

Me? I don’t know, it’s a good question. I’d have to think about that one. Essentially, I was raised as a straightforward scientist. Hey, you know if something is correct based on the available evidence, then it’s correct. not supported by the available evidence. And yeah, okay, well, nice idea, but it wasn’t correct. So that’s the way you go. And essentially If it’s compatible with that, then sure, why not? And if there’s something there that’s fundamentally that in conflict with that, then hmm, that would be fundamentally in conflict with that. So that would, I guess, be my My offhand response. And then I guess the other response would be I don’t know enough about sort of the fundamental Mormon theological beliefs. Certainly, the Mormon transhumanists are a lot more consistent with uh scientific uh beliefs than I had uh previously been led to believe.

Speaker 1

How flattering

Speaker 6

I guess I’d say that the thing that keeps me from wanting to be a transhumanist is the thing that also sometimes makes me pause about identifying myself as a Mormon, and that is that they both seem like boys’ clubs.

Speaker 1

There are more bills at this one than there were last year. I count all that. Awesome.

Speaker 6

I was actually surprised.

Speaker 1

I thought I might be the only one. Yeah, that’s a legitimate concern. That’s a legitimate concern. The demographics of secular transhumanism, of course, are very strongly white male. Of course, there’s exceptions. They’re not all white male, but yes, very strongly so. And then, of course, Mormons are very white. And people who like engineering among Mormons tend to be male because of the way that our demographics play out and who d who’s In the professional working area, right? So, yeah, it unfortunately has been way too much a boys’ club If you could help us change that, that would be wonderful.

Speaker 6

No, I would just say, I mean, it’s not merely demographics, right? I mean, there are. the the privileging of rationality and of reason and of technical um individualistic solutions in transhumanism and the um total invisibility of women in um in Mormon theology and Mormon culture. Well, Mormon hierarchy at least. And I mean, even just today, I mean, we’ve had lots of sort of non-self-conscious quotations about man as the creature with rational capacity and oh hey I’m here I think sometimes and And of course, discussion of God seeing himself in humans, seeing himself in humans, and there’s no Heavenly Mother, and no one mentioned that as a problem. And so I think it’s partly demographic. When you fix the demographics, then those problems start to be articulated and solved, but it’s hard to fix the demographics before you Become conscious of those problems yourselves and start articulating them. And fix the story and the narrative and the way we express it. Yeah.

Speaker 11

So, this is a question for any of the panelists. The family is a key part of the Mormon aesthetic. And I was curious, not just from a Mormon transhumanist perspective, but also just a strict transhumanist perspective, what are the opportunities or possibilities and how it affects the family unit, that transhumanism would affect the family unit, and what are some of those risks?

Speaker 9

By the way, before you answer that question, I just wanted, in Caleb’s defense, I wanted to point out that I think I think he was actually trying to explain why he did not je uh neutr neuter the pronouns in his talk. He wasn’t trying to claim that women are not rational creatures.

Speaker 6

I know. And I’m sorry for singling you out. I mean, I, yeah. I think I knew what you were doing. I did not mean that as an explanation.

Speaker 9

Yeah, I thought he was like deliberately actually trying to. Um promote more gender equality, uh but anyway. Okay. Uh Oh, yeah. Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 1

One of the challenges with the texts, whether they’re ancient texts or even unwritten texts about family. is that we’ve inherited them from many thousands of years of both constructive and destructive patriarchy. And because of that inheritance and the strong aesthetic pull of the ancient, it’s hard for us to pull away from them and sufficiently recognize what some of us feel inside, and is that we have to learn and grow beyond parts of what those ancient texts and some modern texts say. So, and James is spreading his arms for some reason. Oh. Thank you. Getting to the question of the family, I think that there are important things that we need to learn about family that Mormonism can do some incredible things to answer if we will embrace the radicalness of Joseph Smith’s vision about sealings in particular and welding together humanity. Joseph Smith didn’t just seal Men and women in marriages or children to parents. He also sealed, I’ll call it, his friends to him. And I would be ecstatic if Mormonism were to reinstate such behavior and formalize friend relationships. And even consider other sorts of ceilings that may be beneficial to extending the notion of family in ways that we’ve not recently been accustomed to, but I think that Joseph Smith’s behaviors challenge in a very positive way.

Speaker 4

I don’t know if I should say this. Please do. I was talking about Medical nanorobots and nanomedicine and things like that. At some point we develop really good cosmetic surgery. I mean, really good. And this concept that you are a man, and that’s it. Or you are a woman and that’s it goes away. It’s just gone because the mental patterns, the growth, the who you are, that would be something that would be voluntary. But the physical structure is a physical structure. You can be anything you want. I don’t know what implications that has, but from a technical perspective It’s going to be possible.

Speaker 6

I guess another thing I can imagine becoming possible is Sorry. Another thing I can imagine becoming possible is artificial ways of gestation and conception so that women aren’t always the ones who have to bear babies. And that is interesting not just because of the real effects of not having to bear children, but because it would make us rethink the whole raft of things that we have attached to the biological fact of childbearing. You know, it turns out women aren’t actually incapacitated by lactation and pregnancy for more than, you know, maybe a decade out of a life at this point, maybe a little more for Mormon women who have more kids. But we have attached this notion that having children unfits women for much of the rest of the things that humans do. And I think that as we make technological advances that That rationalize that process further and force us to think about it differently. Even if it does, even if we end up still doing things the sort of the way that we’re accustomed to now, even if our biology doesn’t get transformed that much, the way that we think about the biological effects of producing children, I think, could change dramatically. And that That, I think, could have really wonderful effects for families. We already see fathers Spending much more time with their children, being much more involved, and you know, that’s only good. And I think that sort of further uncoupling biology from the ways that we think about family could be really helpful.

Speaker 1

Christine, how do you think about the body and image of God?

Speaker 9

Just so you know, we only have time, time’s out, so maybe one minute each.

Speaker 6

How do I think about the body of God in one minute? The body of God sounds like Bach to me. How’s that? I’ll just leave it as a mysterious statement.

Speaker 1

All right. I guess she’ll have to hear me ask that question again later on this evening. One last question. Who’s got the most important question in the room? Uh-oh, can we take two? Do you want any closing remarks? We really we will get kicked out of this. I know. Let’s take two, and my closing remarks are going to be very short. We’ll take Brian and Reed, and we all promise to try to answer. Succinctly. Read them, Brian. This is for Christine.

Speaker 12

So I’m interested in your suggestions about I don’t know, maybe I’m judging you wrong, but you seem like you’re not a standard stereotypical Mormon. And maybe I’m guessing you might get some backlash about that occasionally. I’m just wondering what your suggestions are or advice for people to help us be constructive, I guess, even though we have differences maybe with a lot of our peers. Do you have any advice for us to help us be constructive?

Speaker 6

I think succinctly, my advice would be Assume that you belong and behave as though you want to belong. And usually people will let you. I like that.

Speaker 14

from just a technical downloading function in the future, this great hard drive in the sky that Whatever. I’m a believer, right? That’s dipping my toes into the transhumanist world. What is the role of the Holy Spirit? This love of God as we go forward? In as a transhumanist?

Speaker 1

I’m going to assume, Ralph, that you’d prefer that I answer this question. So, when I think of the Holy Spirit, the first thing that comes to my mind when I’m trying to communicate with somebody like Ralph is: hold on, I’ve got to translate. And Ralph, when I think of the Holy Spirit, I think of a sublime aesthetic, an aesthetic, something that inspires and provokes me to act. In what I associate with the sublime, in harmony with that, in resonance with that, complementing that, building it, creating it, being compassionate, things like that. So there’s this sublime aesthetic, this Holy Spirit. That inspires the believer. We call it the Holy Spirit. We feel it. It motivates us, it inspires us, it reveals things to us, it guides our lives, it makes life meaningful in so many cases. So I believe that God created the world that we live in. The matrix architect crafted this environment. And that inherent in the shape of the environment is an aesthetic, inherent in the shape of the environment. And that in the same way that organisms evolve and adapt to the terrain, the physical terrain of the environment, our minds will adapt and evolve to the mimetic space, the shape of the environment in which we’ve been placed, and suffer and thrive within that space. And The end goal being not some kind of simple suffering mitigation. Although we’re called to relieve the oppressed, to console and to heal. But the goal is bigger than that, and it’s worth a risk of the suffering, and that is to thrive. And so. The role of the Holy Spirit, as I see it from a transhumanist perspective, is in the structure of the environment we find ourselves and how it shapes our ability to create. the grace of the possibility of creation and how it provokes us to become gods ourselves. And what is that to become a God ourselves? Well, if we narrowly conceive that as exactly the God that We were taught, or that we imagined when we were six years old, then we might be thinking too narrowly about what it even means to be a God, to be a creator. To be a creator in a genuine sense is something that can’t be preconceived. It’s something that has to be created in an ongoing way. So I look at the role of the Holy Spirit as that, as being that thing that pushes us to create, to become gods ourselves.

Speaker 1

So I think we’re out of time. Those were my closing remarks, except for this. You’re all invited to come.

Speaker 1

To the dinner this evening. It’s at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building, which is a beautiful white building right next to Temple Square, that direction.

Speaker 9

If you need a ride, we can help with that as well.

Speaker 1

We will help you get a ride over there. And the dinner, I believe, the time for it has been changed to 6 o’clock. So that’s less than 40 minutes from now. There will be more barbershop. There will be more singing. There will be excellent conversations. I will be

Speaker 3

I promise I’m going to be asking Christine again to answer my question that she evaded.

Speaker 1

And it sounds like there might be an interesting discussion about cryptography going on, and I’m sure all kinds of awesome conversations. So please come and join us and eat the food, and we’ll have a good time. Thanks.