Authors

William James (1842–1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist, widely regarded as the father of American psychology and one of the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A founding figure of pragmatism, James taught at Harvard for decades, where his work shaped philosophy, psychology, and the study of religion in ways that continue to reverberate. James’s contributions span an extraordinary range. His landmark Principles of Psychology (1890) established psychology as a rigorous empirical discipline. His philosophical writings—including The Will to Believe , Pragmatism , and A Pluralistic Universe —developed a vision of truth as something made rather than merely found, tested in lived experience and practical consequence. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he brought the same empirical seriousness to mysticism, conversion, and faith, treating religious experience as genuine data about human consciousness and its possibilities. What animates James’s legacy, and gives it enduring resonance, is his insistence that ideas must be tested against the full weight of human life—its dangers, its moral demands, its capacity for transformation. His account of the “strenuous mood”—the awakening of our deepest energies in response to genuine stakes and infinite demands—captures something essential about the relationship between faith and moral agency. For James, a world without God risks collapsing into a “don’t-care” temperament; religious faith, by opening an infinite scale of obligation and possibility, frees “every sort of energy and endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life’s evils.” This is not theology as mere comfort but as a spur to transformation. His vision of cooperative moral adventure—a world whose perfection is “conditional merely” on whether each agent does their “level best”—frames human existence as a genuinely open, participatory project, one where trust, risk, and collaborative effort are constitutive of whatever good is achieved. That vision sits naturally alongside Mormon transhumanist convictions about theosis, participatory atonement, and humanity’s co-creative role in its own divine future.

William Pickett is a senior hardware engineer and range master at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Mesa Antenna Range, where he has worked for approximately 40 years as both an employee and a contractor. His extensive career in aerospace engineering began with North American Aviation Rockwell on the Apollo program. He gained experience at Autonetics, Hughes Ground Systems Group, IBM, GE, Martin Marietta, and Lockheed Martin before joining JPL. Pickett’s presentation at the MTA conference explores a theological perspective on space exploration, suggesting that a healthy space program, in addition to its scientific and educational benefits, may be the result of divine inspiration. As a native of California and Los Angeles County, Pickett attended Fullerton College and California State College, Fullerton, where he studied electrical engineering. He is a member of the Antenna Measurement Techniques Association and is actively involved in his ward and stake in Pasadena as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Outside of his professional and religious pursuits, Pickett enjoys genealogy and live steam locomotives. Although he has retired once, he anticipates a second retirement in the future, allowing him more time to explore his interests and continue contributing to the discourse surrounding the intersection of science, technology, and theology.

Wolf Tivy is a writer and thinker focused on technology, philosophy, and the future of human agency.

Woody Allen (born 1935) is an American filmmaker, writer, actor, and comedian whose career spans more than six decades. Born Allan Stewart Konigsberg in Brooklyn, New York, he began his career as a comedy writer for television before transitioning to stand-up comedy and filmmaking. Allen’s films frequently explore themes of mortality, meaning, relationships, and the human condition, often with dark humor and philosophical undertones. His work has been influenced by existentialist philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the writings of authors like Dostoevsky and Kafka. Despite controversies in his personal life, Allen’s artistic output has earned numerous Academy Awards and international recognition. His reflections on death, immortality, and the search for meaning resonate with transhumanist concerns about human finitude and the desire for transcendence.

Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) is an Israeli historian, philosopher, and bestselling author best known for his sweeping macro-historical works that examine the past, present, and future of Homo sapiens . A professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Harari has become one of the most influential public intellectuals of the twenty-first century, shaping global conversations about technology, consciousness, and the trajectory of human civilization. Harari earned his PhD from the University of Oxford and initially specialized in medieval and military history before turning to broad questions about the human condition. His breakthrough work, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011; English edition 2014), traces humanity’s rise from insignificant apes to planetary dominators, arguing that our capacity for shared fictions—including religion, money, and nation-states—enabled unprecedented cooperation. Its sequel, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015; English edition 2017), examines how biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and data-driven algorithms may reshape or even supersede humanity. A third major work, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018), addresses the urgent political and existential challenges of the present moment. Harari’s engagement with transhumanist themes is substantial. Homo Deus explicitly explores scenarios in which humans upgrade themselves toward quasi-divine capacities—enhanced cognition, radical life extension, and even engineered bliss—territory that overlaps significantly with Mormon Transhumanist interests in theosis, immortality, and the creative potential of humanity. However, Harari approaches these possibilities with deep ambivalence. He warns that technological transcendence may benefit only a small elite, creating unprecedented inequality, and he questions whether upgraded “Homo Deus” beings would retain anything recognizably human. His framework treats religion primarily as a useful fiction rather than as a genuine encounter with divine reality, and he does not share the Mormon Transhumanist conviction that a compassionate God ordains scientific and technological progress as means toward prophetic fulfillment. Where Mormon Transhumanism sees human potential and divine purpose as mutually reinforcing—with technological advancement serving as a vehicle for God’s work—Harari tends to view the pursuit of godlike power as fraught with existential risk and moral peril, untethered from any transcendent moral order. A practicing Vipassana meditator, Harari’s personal philosophical orientation draws on Buddhist insights about the nature of consciousness and suffering, leading him to emphasize mindfulness and self-awareness as counterweights to technological disruption. His work has been translated into over sixty languages, and he has advised world leaders and spoken at major forums including the World Economic Forum. Whether or not one shares his conclusions, Harari’s bold synthesis of history, biology, and philosophy has made him an indispensable voice in contemporary debates about what humanity is becoming.

Zoltan Istvan is a transhumanist author, philosopher, and futurist. He wrote The Transhumanist Wager and ran for U.S. President in 2016 on a transhumanist platform.