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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 Lincoln Cannon スピリチュアリティ
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  • Embody Christmas

    Embody Christmas
    2025/12/24
    When Christmas returns, I feel drawn to its Earthy images: a child swaddled and cradled in a manger; a stable crafted of stout wood; the lowing of animals; warmth pushing back against the depth of winter. These are more than speculative historical details. They are symbols that affirm the realization of our highest hopes, here in the dust and breath and hunger of embodied life. Doctrine and Covenants 93 illuminates these symbols. “The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy.” By this light, as we watch the sleeping child in the straw, we are invited to consent that God is not alien to nature, but thoroughly expressed therein. The Christmas story is most sublime in its pragmatism: matter as grace, and body as temple. The star above Bethlehem is a natural light – a fiery convergence of elemental processes that ultimately form our own flesh. The shepherds’ labors, Mary’s exhaustion, and Joseph’s worry: in all these, we glimpse that “man was also in the beginning with God.” We too participate in the story of life, of heaven and Earth. D&C 93 proceeds to tell us that Jesus “made flesh [his] tabernacle.” He “received not of the fulness at the first, but received grace for grace.” And he “continued from grace to grace, until he received a fullness.” Unexceptional, this progression is familiar. As Jesus progressed through embodied experience, so do we. Each small act of compassion given and received – a loaf of bread shared, a fire built against the cold, a child comforted, a neighbor welcomed – these are the graces by which we progress. Like Jesus, we receive grace for grace, and continue from grace to grace. And we do so not by escaping embodiment, but by embracing it more purposefully. Christmas is not about any escapist or nihilistic transcendence, but rather about a transcendence of escapism and nihilism. It’s about strenuous engagement with tangible purpose. Birthing pains, newborn cries, swaddling clothes: these welcome the messy beauty of nature as the substance of sublime creation. And every caring gesture, every earnest collaboration, whether enabled by ancient tradition or emerging technology, extends grace toward that light and truth, that intelligence, which is the glory of God. Honor with me, if you will, that which Christmas so beautifully presents and scripture so eloquently describes: spirit and element inseparably connected, embodied as individuals in community, progressing together from grace to grace toward a fulness of joy. Christmas is not an invitation to otherworldly heavens or incorporeal gods, but to the courage, compassion, and creation of Christ on Earth. This is our shared potential, symbolized by the baby in the manger. And this is true worship, emulation, which “receiveth truth and light, until he is glorified in truth and knoweth all things.” Merry Christmas! May your gifts, your embodied grace, progress now and always.
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  • Financial Nihilism Strengthens Crypto

    Financial Nihilism Strengthens Crypto
    2025/12/06
    Every few months, cryptocurrency cycles through yet another bout of financial nihilism. Tokens surge and collapse. New forms of leverage spawn like digital fungi. Degens perform their rituals of glorious self-immolation. Critics claim the entire ecosystem is a casino built on delusion and fraud. Insiders shrug and continue experimenting, as though volatility were simply the price of admission. It’s tempting to see this as a pathology unique to cryptocurrency. But financial nihilism is not new. In fact, financial nihilism is arguably the default state of frontier monetary systems. Even the early monetary system of the United States went through periods of speculation, fraud, and chaos. And rather than destroying the system, these periods strengthened it. They revealed what would fail, what would work, and what people could trust. In its financial nihilism, cryptocurrency is not an anomaly. It has evolved faster than ever before. But it’s still just the latest reenactment of an old economic ritual. The Continental Dollar During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress issued a paper currency, the Continental Dollar. It was essentially an experiment in blind faith. The notes were unbacked by anything other than hope. And they were printed relentlessly to satisfy short term needs, with little planning for long term consequences. Predictably, there was hyperinflation. Speculators traded the notes anyway, hoping to offload them onto each other for marginal gains. Eventually confidence evaporated. And the phrase “not worth a Continental” became a common insult. Independent Banking After independence, the United States Government defined the United States Dollar as a specific weight of silver, corresponding to that of Spanish silver dollars – effectively, a hard fork of the global financial network. But the new dollar wasn’t anything more than a legal definition. The actual cash that people used was basically private IOUs in the form of notes issued by random banks, analogous to crypto stablecoins. To redeem a note for silver, you had to physically travel to the bank. So notes from banks that were far away would trade for less than face value. And scammers would set up banks in the middle of nowhere (“wildcat” banks) so that no one would try to cash out their notes. When people inevitably lost trust in such notes, they would de-peg from the dollar and quickly become worthless – the old west version of a rug pull. The Greenback During the Civil War, the United States Government severed the dollar’s link to precious metals and issued a fiat currency, the Greenback – analogous to an unbacked algorithmic stablecoin issued by the state. But this effectively de-pegged the currency. It began to float freely relative to the value of hard assets. And it became highly volatile, fluctuating wildly based on military performance. The currency only stabilized years later when the government agreed, once again, to exchange Greenback notes for a specific weight of gold – like an algorithmic stablecoin pivoting to a collateralized model. This move successfully re-pegged the currency. Fluctuations subsided. And note discounts vanished. Familiar Patterns in Faster Times Frontier monetary systems exhibit phases of speculation, fraud, and chaos. This isn’t an accident. It’s inevitable. And the degeneracy of financial nihilism is a filter that ultimately separates monetary fantasies from monetary foundations. The early monetary system of the United States did not rise by avoiding financial nihilism. It rose by surviving. The dollar took a century to mature. In contrast, cryptocurrency compresses phases of financial nihilism into astonishingly short intervals. What once unfolded over a generation now unfolds in a year. The speed may be disorienting, but the pattern is the same. Financial nihilism is not evidence of cryptocurrency’s doom. It’s evidence that cryptocurrency is passing through the same filter that all frontier monetary systems, especially the most transformative, have faced. The question is not whether chaos will occur – it already has and will again. The question is which ideas survive that chaos long enough to become infrastructure. All values are forged, not in calm, but by fire. That’s as true of instrumental values as it is of final values. So it shouldn’t surprise us that money, the ultimate abstraction of instrumental values, must itself be forged by fire.
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  • Sankofa Futurism

    Sankofa Futurism
    2025/11/28
    When we think about the origin of Transhumanism, we often think about Europe and America: from Enlightenment humanism, through the industrial revolution, and onward to Silicon Valley. That conception is true enough, if we’re thinking about Transhumanism in name. But if we’re thinking about Transhumanism in function, there’s much more to the story. And that story is as old and diverse as humanity itself. Modern use of the word “transhumanism” may come from Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist in the 1950s. His younger brother, Aldous Huxley, popularized the concept known as “perennial philosophy.” It’s basically the idea that all the world’s major religions, cultural traditions, and ancient myths have common core elements. Prominent among them is humanity’s shared aspiration for transcendence, both physical and cognitive, reflecting a much older theological use of “transhumanize” in Dante’s Paradiso. A contemporary of the Huxley brothers, Joseph Campbell mapped perennial philosophy onto a concept that he called “monomyth.” His insight was that we express perennial philosophy through perennial narrative. In other words, all our cultural traditions tell stories with common core elements. And Campbell focused, in particular, on what he described as the “hero’s journey” – or what we might understand as humanity’s shared story of transcendence. Perennial philosophy and monomyth don’t originate in Europe or America, at least not uniquely. Humanity’s shared aspirations and stories of physical and cognitive transcendence – that is to say, stories that function as Transhumanism – stretch back through time to the dawn of history. And, of course, that includes Africa. So today, as we imagine how best to express Transhumanism in persuasive and helpful ways – in ways that will actually prove transformative – I commend to you an idea that comes from the Akan people in West Africa. That idea is Sankofa, or what we might call “Sankofa futurism.” It’s symbolized by a mythical bird that’s moving forward while reaching back for an egg. And it literally means, “go back and get it,” or use wisdom from the past to make the future better. In that spirit, I’ve collected some traditional stories from Africa. They represent the ancient and enduring human aspiration to transcendence, across the spectrum of physical and cognitive capacity. In function, they’re Transhumanist stories. Or at least they can be, if we choose to interpret them in light of modern science and emerging technology, as I’ll illustrate. Anansi and the Singularity Akan people tell of the trickster Anansi, who attempts to centralize the world’s data into a single proprietary database, intending to become the sole administrator of knowledge. He successfully scrapes wisdom from every corner of the globe, but he finds the server too heavy to carry up the tree of life alone. When a glitch in his user interface causes him to drop the container, the data is decentralized into the winds. Anansi’s story foreshadows the Transhumanist debate about technological singularity, and the risks of a singleton superintelligence. Isis and Immortalism In the sacred texts of Egypt, Isis refuses to accept the annihilation of Osiris after his brother hacks his body into scattered pieces. She initiates a forensic search across the cosmos, retrieving fragments of information and painstakingly reassembling the pattern of his body. Ultimately, her project succeeds: his body reboots and his mind returns, surviving the destruction of its former physical substrate. Isis’ story anticipates the Transhumanist narrative of immortalism: that with sufficient data, death is curable rather than final. Modjadji and Paradise Engineering Balobedu people describe Modjadji, a matriarch who possesses biotech that can control local weather patterns. She uses secret codes to regulate precipitation, ending droughts or summoning storms as a defense mechanism. Her dynasty passes an encryption key genetically, from mother to daughter, maintaining a civilization that actively solves problems of scarcity and environmental threat. Modjadji’s story suggests the Transhumanist narrative of paradise engineering: that we have a moral obligation to mitigate involuntary risk of suffering. Nana Miriam and Nanotechnology Songhai people tell of the sorceress Nana Miriam, who confronts a shape-shifting beast that instantly adapts its physical form to shatter any conventional weapon. She defeats this rapidly evolving threat not with brute force, but by using a specialized powder to reconfigure molecular structures in real-time. When the beast transforms into a wall of raging fire, she deploys the substance to transmute the flames into water, neutralizing the attack instantly. Nana Miriam’s story prefigures the Transhumanist ambition of nanotech, with programmable matter. Nommo and Cosmic Expansion Dogon elders describe the arrival of Nommo, ...
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