The Mormon Transhumanist Association is a group of transhumanist Latter-day Saints who believe in science and technology. They are a branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but are not required to be a member of the church. In this episode, we talk to the Association's co-founders, Carl and Lincoln Youngblood, about their vision for the group and what it means to them.
00:08:50.320Yeah, I mean, what you've described really resonates strongly with me, that there are
00:08:55.500emergent properties, both in the human body itself.
00:09:00.220You think about how we evolve from lower life forms that eventually exhibited a sufficient degree of
00:09:08.540complexity to where emergent phenomena like the ability to think and to express yourself in words and to do amazing feats.
00:09:16.880And when you look at human organizations at a macroscopic level or imagine them that way, you can start to see even more interesting sociological phenomena occur.
00:09:29.820And we have as well, you know, the Christian Pauline metaphor of the body of Christ, where he described the, you know, all of the members of Christ's church as a kind of single body that if you could look at it from far away, would each have appendages and members and organs and each person is doing something useful.
00:09:52.460We may not be sure what it is, like, maybe I'm the spleen and no one can see what my purpose is other than to sit there and be annoying.
00:09:59.720But, you know, there's probably some version, something that each person is contributing, hopefully, that is benefiting the whole, right?
00:10:09.580Just for listeners who may not be familiar with the concept of emergent properties, because it's something that people who talk in this space would be very familiar with.
00:10:15.940You can think of it as, like, you broadly understand how, like, H2O molecules look, kind of, how they interact with each other, but that them interacting in mass leads to the concept that we know of as wetness.
00:10:29.240You don't think that there's some extra spiritual thing that's added to the water to make the wetness appear.
00:10:35.080You just understand that this very different phenomenon seems to emerge when these specific things are interacting in a way that individually you can understand, and you can understand why they might lead to something that at a higher order looks like wetness.
00:10:48.740But the actual moment it turns from water molecules interacting to wetness is something that our brains just are not structured to understand or to grasp.
00:10:59.780You could almost say that, like, you need to have some level of abstraction to even comprehend wetness, right?
00:11:08.480It's like, if you had to think about the individual movements of every single H2O molecule, you would get lost in the shuffle.
00:11:17.620You wouldn't be able to observe the emergent property, right?
00:11:21.860I really want to focus or talk a bit about this argument that you sent me that Lincoln came up with.
00:11:26.320Lincoln, I'd love it if you could present it.
00:11:28.080I forget the name of it, but it's very similar to arguments that we have laid out with, like, I think minor aesthetic differences that highlight the difference between our communities.
00:11:37.660And I think a really fun way that people might be surprised about the things we disagree on.
00:11:42.560So I'd love to hear this argument presented for our audience.
00:11:49.220Yeah, I can give you a nutshell version of that with the caveat that there's a great deal of potential complexity to understanding it.
00:11:59.920And sometimes the nutshell version gives people just enough to misunderstand it.
00:12:03.960But I'm more than willing to share it anyway.
00:12:05.980Anyway, so the new God argument is an argument not to prove the existence of God, but to prove that we should trust in or have active practical faith in that which may constitute God, given certain understandings of God.
00:12:25.400So there's a little bit of complexity there.
00:12:27.180It's not an argument about Platonic philosophy versions of the good or of the theologies that descend from Platonic philosophy.
00:12:35.980It's a much more practical argument than that.
00:12:38.700It's about an argument on behalf of trust in a God that is the kind of God that could arise within nature, a natural God.
00:12:46.220And it begins with purely secular assumptions, and it uses those secular assumptions to reach conclusions that sound and operate very much like the conclusions of theism.
00:13:03.780And so for theists who are not attached to anti-naturalist metaphysics, this argument is quite compelling.
00:13:11.520And for people maybe who aren't even theists, but who are open-minded enough to deeply consider the argument, it can be transformative of their theological identity.
00:13:34.660And we make this assumption and we say, hey, this is something that we ought to trust in for practical reasons, for pragmatic reasons.
00:13:41.520If we don't trust in this possibility, we undermine our own efforts to get there.
00:13:46.040It also kind of entails that superhumanity has dignity, that it's something worth pursuing, something that we can pursue, something that we should pursue, something that we want to pursue.
00:13:55.620So all of those are kind of bundled together in the assumption.
00:13:58.580And we call that the faith assumption, the assumption that humanity will become superhumanity.
00:14:04.060Then there are two arguments that are built on top of that assumption.
00:14:07.920One of the arguments is called the compassion argument, and the other is called the creation argument.
00:14:13.680Both of those arguments introduce two more assumptions each, and they use that first assumption, the faith assumption, to reach conclusions about the nature of superhumanity, what superhumanity is probably like if we make those assumptions.
00:14:28.640The compassion argument makes two assumptions, as I said.
00:14:32.780One of those assumptions is a description of the possibility space for superhumanity.
00:14:38.780And the possibility space of superhumanity is, A, superhumanity won't happen.
00:15:32.260It might not prove true, but there is, again, practical reasons why we would probably want it to be true.
00:15:38.880Unless you are a big fan of living or you wouldn't be living anymore.
00:15:42.620If you're a big fan of being assimilated into the Borg, then you have reason to not want to be part of a singleton.
00:15:50.420So if we make that assumption that superhumanity will have more decentralized power, and we maintain the faith assumption that humanity will become superhumanity, then that negates two of the three parts of the possibility space, leaving only one.
00:16:07.920And that third part of the possibility space is that humanity will have more decentralized power, or excuse me, superhumanity will have more decentralized power than humanity has.
00:16:21.000And then we look at some of the ramifications of that.
00:16:23.940One of the ramifications of that is that decentralized power is a very predictable quality for cooperation.
00:16:32.040Where there's more decentralized power, there's more cooperation.
00:16:35.900In a previous email discussion with Malcolm, Malcolm brought up the truth that this only works for in-groups, those that have the power.
00:16:46.460The point of the argument is that as we decentralize power, we become predictable to those who have power.
00:16:52.260And so by decentralizing power more to more agents, we become predictable to more agents, and therefore more likely to be cooperative with more agents.
00:17:00.560And then kind of the final part of the reasoning here is that decentralized power pressed to its limits requires decentralized cooperation pressed to its limits, which becomes practically indistinguishable from compassion for all practical purposes.
00:17:14.980So superhumanity, given those assumptions, those two assumptions we made, would be more compassionate than humanity.
00:17:38.080Or B, superhumanity will either choose not to or not have the ability to run many emulations of its evolutionary history.
00:17:46.320Or C, we're almost certainly living in one of those emulations of the evolutionary history of superhumanity.
00:17:54.420And the reasoning for this goes back to the simulation argument.
00:17:58.360It's an argument that's most well known for having been formulated by Nick Bostrom, but the argument's actually older than his formulation.
00:18:05.720He just did a very good job of expressing it.
00:18:08.180And that argument is basically that either superhumanity will never become superhumanity, or for whatever reason, they won't run a simulation.
00:18:18.280Or if they do run a significant number of simulations of their ancestral history, then we're almost certainly living in one of those ourselves, just for reasons of probabilities, statistics.
00:18:29.840As it turns out, the simulation argument can be generalized.
00:18:32.620It doesn't depend on simulation technology.
00:18:35.060It works just as well, the math works just as reliably for any creative mechanism that we think may be feasible.
00:18:43.460Maybe it's cosmoforming, maybe it's terraforming, maybe it's computing of some other nature than what we might think of as simulation.
00:18:50.400The same logic, the same mathematics hold out.
00:18:53.100And so the creation argument, first of all, uses the faith assumption and negates one aspect of the possibility space.
00:19:00.380No, we're not going to go extinct because we assumed that away.
00:19:02.720It also makes the assumption that superhumanity will have the ability and interest in running emulations, whether they're simulations or cosmoforming or terraforming or what, emulations of their evolutionary history.
00:19:13.800And the logical probabilistic consequence of that, we're almost certainly living in one of those emulations ourselves.
00:19:19.780So then the argument concludes by combining the conclusions of the compassion and the creation arguments and says that superhumanity probably would be more compassionate than us.
00:19:32.880Again, this is a probabilistic argument.
00:19:34.980And from the creation argument, superhumanity probably created our world.
00:19:38.600And those two conclusions, when combined, sound very much like God as understood by traditional theology, so long as you're willing to accept a natural version of God, which some people will not like on metaphysical grounds.
00:19:57.880A progressing God, right, who emerged from simpler forms.
00:20:01.880Yeah, and fortunately for Mormon theology, that's exactly what God is in Mormon theology, right?
00:20:07.200God does not start as God in Mormon theology.
00:20:10.780So one thing I'm really curious about is, like, I mean, the movement's been around for a while.
00:20:14.580And like you say, like, it's not that distinguished from, like, mainstream LDS.
00:20:19.700But I think listeners to the show can also see why it has so many similarities to our belief system.
00:20:24.700Very, very, very, very many similarities.
00:20:27.400But are there any, like, sort of day-to-day or month-to-month or year-to-year differences in the lifestyle or practices of a transhumanist Mormon versus a mainstream normal not considering themselves transhumanist Mormon?
00:20:40.500I guess that would probably vary from individual to individual.
00:20:44.380But I certainly think that some of the things that are on our radar because of the particular interests of our group tend to cause certain values to bubble up.
00:20:55.560So, for example, some of us are engaged in things like intermittent fasting, other things around health.
00:21:02.880We're a little more keyed into some of the new discoveries around health and longevity and trying to do our best to improve our health a little bit and be a little more mindful of some things that maybe an average Latter-day Saint might not be as concerned about.
00:21:20.600So, basically, would it be accurate to say, like, broader, just more technophilia in general?
00:21:27.200Oh, yeah. Yeah, I think so. Like, there's more tech nerds among us than probably in the average, you know, LDS cohort or whatever.
00:21:37.540So, I'd love to get an idea. What's the fertility rate like in this community?
00:21:41.980And what's the geographic distribution of the community?
00:21:47.220The second president of the Mormon Transhumanist Association has, what, eight children? Is that right, Carl? Chris?
00:21:54.640In fact, Chris is a really interesting figure. I hope he'll forgive us for speaking on his behalf while he's not here.
00:22:02.260But he calls himself a liberal fundamentalist.
00:22:06.060And he just kind of like jokingly about how he has certain qualities that you might think of as fundamentalist, but he's also kind of progressive in other ways.
00:22:16.220And he often had said, he claims that, like, if, if progressive, people with progressive politics really cared about propagating their ideas and sharing them more broadly, that they would have more children, right?
00:22:30.280And so, I've always thought that was kind of interesting.
00:22:33.440I agree. I hope that he keeps some aspect of the progressive movement alive.
00:22:41.740Like, I do not think the progressive movement is bad.
00:22:43.740And one of the things that we bemoan the most on this show is that it's one of the movements that, unless some people like him are able to find ways to intergenerationally preserve it, that's going to most quickly go extinct.
00:22:54.480Yeah, and I should clarify that I think Chris is fairly nuanced in his politics, so he's not your typical sort of leftist or whatever.
00:23:02.840But I think it's more just that, I don't know, I often say that I think that a Christian should actually have qualities that appear on both the right and the left, and some that appear on either side as well.
00:23:16.700Well, if you're on either side, especially considering how oddly scattershot and, like, in many cases non-thematic the ideological clusterings are politically in the United States, like, there's a lot of stuff that's conservative, and it's like, this doesn't, why is this a conservative thing?
00:23:41.400You need to follow your religion's principles, not those of a particular ideological team, especially considering how illogically inconsistent our ideological teams are now.
00:23:50.140Do you know if there's any second-generation transhumanist Mormons yet, i.e. kids where this belief system has been successfully passed between generations?
00:23:58.840All of my children are Mormon transhumanists.
00:24:35.020I guess he's a pretty good community builder, so suddenly we have almost 30 different groups that he has opened up in various African countries and is currently sharing some ideas with them.
00:24:49.580I would say that it's still very nascent over there.
00:24:54.980They're still even figuring out what it is that Mormon transhumanism is and asking us a lot of questions about some of our beliefs.
00:25:04.480And, you know, it's been interesting also to see the reception amongst different groups where some of them are like,
00:25:11.480Are these guys even Latter-day Saints?
00:25:13.600Like, you know, they're just a little bit surprised at first, but I think as they learn more about it and as we've been having monthly meetups,
00:25:22.100virtual monthly meetups with them, they're starting to see, oh, yeah, you guys sound familiar.
00:25:26.780You know, the things you're saying aren't too out there for us, you know, so.
00:25:30.220It's funny, like, to an outsider, just how close that is to the Matt Stone and Trey Parker Broadway play, The Book of Mormon,
00:25:37.900that, like, somehow, like, in Africa, now you have all these people who are, like, talking, like, about high tech,
00:25:50.680My emphasis is different for Africans.
00:25:52.760Like, one of the things that I have been strongly encouraging the African chapters of our association about
00:26:00.780is to gain as much education as possible.
00:26:03.360Like, that is a principle that Latter-day Saints firmly believe in that's been affirmed by several of our leaders in general conference.
00:26:11.620But it's something that is now on the reach of a lot of Africans because the church just recently
00:26:19.540a remote education program that will hopefully extend the blessings of a strong liberal education to the whole world.
00:26:30.720Whereas, up to now, it's been largely available to those who live near one of the actual universities of the church,
00:26:37.760but not, it's a little harder to get to in some of these developing nations, right?
00:26:42.320Something I wanted to pull on here, and you can correct me if I'm wrong in this sort of understanding of what's going on with the African movement,
00:26:49.220but that they are culturally a little different from the branch that's in the U.S.
00:26:54.120And that in the U.S., it seems almost sort of ancillary to the core theology of the movement.
00:27:00.300The movement is slightly more progressive in its social ideology,
00:27:05.220where the African movement is more conservative in its social ideology.