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Lincoln Cannon

Lincoln Cannon

著者： Lincoln Cannon
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Lincoln Cannon is a technologist and philosopher, and leading voice of Mormon Transhumanism.2025-2026 Lincoln Cannon スピリチュアリティ
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  • TrueChristian® Hypocrisy

    TrueChristian® Hypocrisy
    2026/08/27
    I received a Google Alert for “[Christians Only] WDYT of Christian Transhumanism Association?: r/TrueChristian - Reddit.” Christians only? Okay. I’m Christian. So I clicked on the link and read the thread. The “Christian” originator tells of going down the proverbial “rabbit hole” and learning about Christian Transhumanism. Although confused and inviting thoughts, he’s “pretty sure” that the common Christian Transhumanist idea of resurrecting the dead is “heresy.” An “Eastern Orthodox” commenter confirms, “just by seeing their name I know they’re at least heretics or not even Christians.” A “Christian non-nationalist” shares, “My first concern is their participatory technological language around resurrection.” He continues, “I don’t read the Bible as suggesting that this is anything other than a work of our awesome creator.” Oh, and by the way, “I’m also concerned about the apparent composition … including Mormon Transhumanists and secular-adjacent futurist writers …” And “Non-Denominational” concludes, feigning imitation of a Christian Transhumanists, “We want to disrespect God’s image by enhancing human bodies essentially mutilating our own bodies that are made in the image of the God we do claim to love!” Hmm. So much nonsense. Maybe I should respond, I thought. So I tried. Jesus: Raise the dead. TrueChristian: Heresy. But it didn’t work. A bot quickly informed me that my comment had been removed. Why? I was commenting “without flair identifying [me] as a trinitarian believer.” The bot also explained how I’m not a Christian. I “may not utilize a Christian flair,” it informed me, if I “deny the Trinity or other beliefs expressed in the Nicene Creed.” And even if I choose to use the flair to identify myself as a Christian, I’m “still not allowed to post in a Christians Only thread.” The bot concluded with instructions about how to add flair below “__ followers of Christ are online.” So here we are. TrueChristian® won’t receive my message. But you, dear reader, you’re receiving it now, whether you like it or not. Of course it’s nothing new. TrueChristian® has been demonizing me for decades. And they’ll probably continue for decades more. Not so secretly, I hope so because it’s free advertising. But I do wish to call special attention to this particular exchange. It encapsulates, so well, the fundamental hypocrisy of TrueChristian®. They claim to be Christian, which above all connotes reverence for Jesus and the Bible. And yet their words implicitly reject both to an extent that would be surprising if it weren’t so common. “Do the works you see me do,” says Jesus in the Bible, as he raises the dead repeatedly. But the first concern of TrueChristian® is participatory language around resurrection. “Raise the dead,” says Jesus in the Bible, as if his example isn’t enough. But TrueChristian® is pretty sure that’s heresy. “Touch me and see,” says Jesus in the Bible, appearing bodily as if from nowhere after having been crucified. But enhancing human bodies is mutilation for TrueChristian®. So much hypocrisy. Meanwhile, I’m not a Christian because Mormons don’t revere the Nicene Creed. And Transhumanists are just yuck. Too little Nicea. Too much Jesus, Bible, and yuck. No wonder “__ followers of Christ are online.”
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  • Without Beginning

    Without Beginning
    2026/08/08
    Dorothée and I usually watch a show together before bed. Presently, we’re watching a science fiction show with a narrative that revolves around time travel. It’s entertaining, especially the recreations of historical events that bump into modern sensibilities. But it’s also incoherent in many ways. My work sometimes invites questions about time travel, for at least a couple reasons. First, although neither intended nor necessary, time travel could explain recursion in the Creation Argument of the New God Argument. When people read the idea that superhumanity creates superhumanity, they sometimes imagine the future of our human civilization creating our past and present in a simple time loop. But only procedural recursion, not temporal recursion, is required by the argument. And adding notions of temporal recursion tends to create more problems than it solves, in my estimation. Second, something like a subtle version of time travel could explain my observation that Mormon theology entails neither a finite nor an infinite regress of Gods. As the Kolob hymn puts it, “Do you think that you could ever, through all eternity, find out the generation where Gods began to be?” Such questions imply at least a third possibility: an indefinite regress. Maybe our present can create not only our future but also our past to some extent. Quantum physics may allow for an alternative to the commonsense notion that reality is determined exclusively from past to future. For example, consider observer effects in delayed-choice experiments. You send a photon along a path that requires either a wave or a particle state. But the state along the path is indefinite until you look at the photon afterwards, at which time the past state becomes definite. Did you change the past? You didn’t change the past of the photon from one definite state to another. But apparently you did change the past state of the photon from indefinite to definite. So if you didn’t change the past then you created the past, to whatever extent the past exists. That’s an unusual way to think about the past. But it’s quite like the ordinary way of thinking about the future. We aren’t changing the future from one definite state to another. We’re changing an indefinite future into a definite present. Outside of strange experiments, the past seems much more definite than the future. But what if the distant past is as indefinite as the near future? What if the distant past exists no more nor less than the near future? Perhaps the historians’ project, at cosmological scale, is persistently changing an indefinite past into the definite present? Imagine that we are, here and now, near the forward-moving edge of relatively high spacetime definiteness. The proximate past is highly defined by memories, records, environment, and other present constraints. But both the future and the distant past are increasingly indefinite to the extent that present constraints are sparse or absent. Reality, as we experience it, would be a region of relative definiteness surrounded temporally, and perhaps spatially, by horizons of increasing indefiniteness. It’s not controversial to claim that we know less about the distant past than the recent past. But I’m suggesting more. Experiments suggest that some aspects of the past are not merely unknown but genuinely indefinite, such that they exist only to the extent that we create them. And perhaps these indefinite aspects of the past increasingly accumulate until the distant past becomes as indefinite as the future. Again, this wouldn’t mean that we could change definite historical events. Dense networks of mutually reinforcing correlations would still ensure that the proximate past remains as stable as commonsense supposes it to be. But beyond the horizons of the densely definite, toward not only the future but also the past, reality may be knowable only to the extent that we create it. Let’s return to Mormon theology. There might be neither a first generation of Gods nor an infinite regress. The Gods themselves might not know. And that might not be ignorance as much as it is an honest account of limits on knowledge as imposed by reality – the limits of that which is actually knowable. Without beginning, the Gods find themselves making worlds without end. Looking toward the future, although constrained by the present, they see indefinite possibilities of creation. Looking toward the near past, more heavily constrained by the present, they see definite possibilities of discovery. Looking farther still, they find themselves making worlds without beginning.
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  • The Vanguardism Trap

    The Vanguardism Trap
    2026/08/22
    A friend recently described to me a “stench of fascism” in rationalist discourse. “Any theory that makes ‘clear thinking’ a scarce, trainable, testable property generates a distinction between those who have it and those who don’t,” he wrote. “And that distinction is convertible into political authority no matter what the theory says about itself.” He’s right about the mechanism. I’ve smelled it too. But there’s probably a more useful name for it. What he and I have smelled, I suggest, may be more usefully characterized as vanguardism. This is an ideology commonly associated with Vladimir Lenin, who led the Bolsheviks that became the Russian Communist Party. His vanguard claimed superior revolutionary consciousness and organizational discipline. In a broader sense, vanguardism advocates a trained elite empowered to override the judgment of the untrained many, usually in the name of stakes that are too high for untrained deliberation. Recognizing vanguardism matters because it guides our attention to focus differently, and probably more effectively. The risk of vanguardism probably isn’t so much that it would lead rationalists to ultranationalism or the particular kinds of violence historically associated with fascism. That seems orthogonal or at least less proximate to an imminent risk. The risk of vanguardism is that it would lead rationalists to advocate large-scale ceding of human agency to supposed clear thinkers who need not answer to anyone beyond themselves. In function, vanguardism is not unique to any one ideology. Plato’s philosopher-kings, Gnostic special knowledge, Calvinist election, and even misused priesthood authority in the Mormon tradition all share the same risk. A claim of privileged access can convert into a claim of governance over those who lack it. Vanguardism among rationalists may be relatively new. But the attendant risk is already being realized. Many advocate centralizing control of artificial intelligence and other transformative technologies in the name of safety. And some, in or adjacent to rationalist circles, have descended into the anti-democratic neoreactionary “Dark Enlightenment.” Some of these vanguardist rationalists, presumably a minority, may imagine superior ethics to be deducible from superior epistemics. Maybe we can dismiss them as marginal. But many other rationalists make the more subtle vanguardist mistake of supposing superior ethics to be correlated with superior epistemics. They reason that because they understand the facts, risks, and consequences most clearly, they should be empowered to adjudicate values for the rest of us. In contrast, pragmatist philosopher John Dewey observed that democracy isn’t primarily about ascertaining facts. It doesn’t compete with expertise. Rather, democracy is primarily about forming and transforming values, and thereby deciding what we should do with facts. No expert can do that without us because, although facts constrain values, values also constrain facts. In fact, values constrain not only discovery but also creation of facts. Values create more values, which are themselves a kind of fact. And values create other kinds of facts as a consequence of action on values. Moreover, the creation of facts is a consequence of plural action on values, creating realities that even the clearest thinkers, greatest experts, and superintelligent Gods cannot create without us. Ethics, actually to be ethics, must be grounded in values. More fundamentally, ethics must be grounded in desire. Facts and rationality are certainly important, even utterly necessary, as we seek to fulfill and reconcile desire. But neither is sufficient without desire. “Desire” that is asserted from the top down is not and cannot coherently be our desire. It would be our enslavement or annihilation. And the self-appointed clear thinkers who would centralize the power of our agency into their own, “for our good,” would be our enslavers or annihilators. Such is the risk of vanguardism. Rationalists must vigorously resist vanguardism. The model of clear thinking that would justify it is epistemically incomplete, lacking that which cannot be coherently centralized. In its stead, we can formulate, embrace, and advocate strong arguments for the hard work of formal decentralization. And we can put those arguments into practical application, restructuring the world such that our common good persists as that which emerges among us, and resists that which asserts itself over us. Decentralization, not vanguardism, is how we ensure a beautiful future for humanity, without coercion that would amount to no future at all.
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