Authors

Cameron Dayton is an American video game creative director, novelist, and writer known for his work in the gaming industry and speculative fiction. He has held prominent creative roles at several major studios, contributing to well-known franchises and original intellectual properties. Dayton served as creative director at Certain Affinity and has worked in narrative and creative leadership positions across the video game industry. He is also the author of the novel Etherwalker , a science-fantasy work set in a far-future world where technology and myth have intertwined, exploring themes of lost civilizations, human potential, and the rediscovery of powerful ancient technologies. His fiction often inhabits the intersection of epic fantasy and science fiction, imagining futures in which humanity’s relationship with technology is both perilous and transformative. Dayton has roots in the Latter-day Saint community, and his creative work reflects an imagination shaped by themes resonant with Mormon Transhumanist thought—particularly the idea that humanity’s trajectory involves the responsible stewardship of extraordinary power, and that the boundaries between the mundane and the transcendent are more porous than they appear. His speculative worlds frequently explore the tension between knowledge and wisdom, technological mastery and moral responsibility, echoing the Mormon Transhumanist conviction that scientific and technological progress are inseparable from ethical and spiritual development. His storytelling invites readers to consider what it means for ordinary individuals to inherit or rediscover capacities that border on the divine—a narrative arc that parallels the Latter-day Saint doctrine of theosis and the transhumanist aspiration toward radical human flourishing.

Carl Youngblood co-founded the MTA in 2006 and has served as its President and CEO since 2021. He is engaged with the Association’s efforts to explore the intersection of Mormon theology and transhumanist philosophy. Among the many initiatives that Carl has been involved with, he has designed and built the Association’s current website, which unifies all prior content in a single location using inspiring visuals and animations. Youngblood’s professional career spans more than two decades of full-stack software development at the intersection of Silicon Slopes and Silicon Valley. He was an early employee at Omniture (acquired by Adobe), a founding engineering leader at Divvy (a Utah-based unicorn startup), co-founder of Blockscale LLC (a blockchain services firm eventually contracted into Coinbase), and Senior Solutions Architect for Amazon Managed Blockchain at AWS. His technical fluency ranges from scalable web architecture to blockchain infrastructure—the kind of deep engineering experience that grounds his theological speculation in working knowledge of the systems he writes about. Under his leadership, the Association has developed its mission of promoting abundant human flourishing through the compassionate use of science and technology, fostering dialogue across secular and religious audiences and arguing that each has something essential to learn from the other. His writing, collected on his blog From the Depths , spans over a decade of conference presentations and theological essays: meditations on participatory resurrection, the alignment of artificial intelligence read through the Grand Council narrative, intelligence as eternal and multifaceted, and religion as social technology. He writes, as a colleague has observed, with warmth and accessibility on questions of momentous practical consequence—how to navigate faith crisis without losing faith’s power, how to think about resurrection as something we actively participate in rather than passively receive. Youngblood’s distinctive contribution to transhumanism is the integration of serious technical expertise with serious theological reflection. He embodies the Mormon transhumanist conviction that scientific and spiritual development are not parallel tracks but a single path—that the learning required to build better systems is continuous with the exaltation Mormon theology envisions, and that human ingenuity, rightly oriented, is itself a divine imperative.

Carver Mead (born 1934) is an American engineer, physicist, and pioneer of modern microelectronics whose foundational contributions to semiconductor theory and very-large-scale integration (VLSI) helped make the silicon age possible. A Gordon and Betty Moore Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology, Mead spent decades at the frontier of what computation could become, both as a theorist and as a practical builder of systems. Mead’s career achievements span an extraordinary range. He developed key models for understanding transistor behavior at the nanoscale, co-authored (with Lynn Conway) the landmark 1980 textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems , and essentially invented the methodology by which engineers design the dense integrated circuits that now inhabit every corner of modern life. He also pioneered neuromorphic engineering—the design of circuits that mimic the computational architecture of biological neural systems—and founded companies that applied these principles to sensory processing and analog computation. In 2022, he was awarded the Harold Pender Award; earlier recognition includes the Lemelson-MIT Prize and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. What distinguishes Mead as a thinker is not only what he built but how he understood the act of building. He insisted that Moore’s Law is fundamentally a story about human belief: “Moore’s Law is really a thing about human activity, it’s about vision, it’s about what you’re allowed to believe. Because people are really limited by their beliefs, they limit themselves by what they allow themselves to believe about what is possible.” In this reading, technological progress is not an autonomous material force but a function of expanded imagination—a civilizational act of faith in possibility. This framing resonates deeply with traditions that locate human creativity within a larger divine economy, where intelligence, rightly directed and disciplined by moral courage, participates in the ongoing work of creation. Mead’s insistence that the boundary between what is and what could be is first a boundary of belief, and only second a boundary of physics, echoes the Mormon transhumanist conviction that humanity’s divine future is not given passively but willed, practiced, and built—one hard-won increment of understanding at a time.

Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) was an American cultural anthropologist who changed how scholars think about religion, ritual, and meaning. Trained at Harvard and shaped by fieldwork in Java, Bali, and Morocco, he built his career on a conviction that culture is not a set of behaviors to be measured but a web of significance to be read, the way one reads a text. He taught at the University of Chicago before settling at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he spent the latter half of his career writing some of the most widely cited books in the social sciences. Geertz called his method “thick description”: rather than explain a Balinese cockfight or a Javanese funeral by reducing it to biology or economics, he asked what the practice meant to the people inside it, and what it revealed about how they organized their sense of reality. This approach ran through his major works, including The Religion of Java , The Interpretation of Cultures , and Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali . His most quoted formulation defined religion as a system of symbols that establishes durable moods and motivations in people by framing a general order of existence and making that framing feel simply real. The definition is spare on purpose, and its reach turns out to exceed anything Geertz set out to catalogue. Because it locates religion in function rather than in a list of approved doctrines or institutions, it travels easily to commitments that never call themselves religious at all. Researchers who study what has come to be called implicit religion have used exactly this move to read nationalism, therapeutic self-help, environmentalism, and various strands of secular humanism as systems that generate the same durable moods and motivations, the same felt sense of a general order of existence, that Geertz found in Java and Bali. Even certain critiques of religion turn out to run on the pattern they attack: a conviction that history bends toward a certain outcome, a set of rituals of dissent, a community bound by shared moral certainty. None of this requires supernatural claims. It only requires that a symbol system do the work religion has always done, which is to make an account of reality feel like the account of reality. That insight matters for anyone thinking about religion as something people build and inhabit rather than only something they are handed. Geertz kept his own account descriptive, declining to adjudicate whether any given order of existence is true. But a tradition that treats faith as trust translated into action, and treats every serious human commitment as evidence of something worth taking seriously about how people orient toward transformation, finds in Geertz’s account not a rival theory but a working description of the machinery, machinery that operates whether the community calls its ultimate concern God, history, nature, or humanity’s own unrealized potential.

Connie Packer has previously served as the Vice President of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. As a leader within the MTA, she played a key role in guiding the Association’s activities and affairs, focusing on the publication of quality content related to transhumanism and Mormon Transhumanism. Packer helped to facilitate important processes like board member elections and charitable endeavors through initiatives like Kiva Micro Loans, which have collectively funded hundreds of loans to help lift people, improve their conditions, and help them reach their goals.

Cyprian of Carthage (c. 200–258 CE) was one of the most influential bishops and theologians of early Christianity, whose writings on ecclesiology, martyrdom, and the nature of the Church shaped Latin Christian thought for centuries. Born in Roman North Africa, likely to a wealthy pagan family, Cyprian converted to Christianity around 246 CE and rose rapidly to become Bishop of Carthage within two years. His episcopate was defined by crisis: he led his community through the Decian and Valerian persecutions, navigating fierce debates over how to treat Christians who had lapsed under imperial pressure. His treatises—among them On the Unity of the Church , On the Lapsed , On Mortality , and On Works and Almsgiving —combined pastoral urgency with theological precision, establishing principles of communal discipline, sacramental life, and episcopal authority that would echo through Western Christianity. He was martyred in 258 CE under the Emperor Valerian, becoming one of the most venerated figures in the early Church. Cyprian’s theological legacy is most vivid where it touches the question of human transformation. His conviction that Christ assumed the fullness of human nature so that humanity might ascend to share in the divine—captured in the axiom that what humanity is, Christ was willing to become, so that humanity might become what Christ is—places him in the ancient tradition of theosis, the teaching that the divine-human gap is not a fixed boundary but a trajectory of becoming. This vision of participation in the divine life, grounded in incarnation and sustained by community, finds deep resonance with the Mormon transhumanist intuition that human potential is genuinely open-ended, that the relationship between humanity and God is one of shared nature and increasing likeness rather than infinite ontological distance. Cyprian did not frame this hope in technological terms, but his insistence that moral transformation, communal practice, and the grace of Christ collaborate in making humanity more than it currently is speaks across centuries to anyone who takes seriously the possibility that the divine future of the human person is real, not merely symbolic.

Dr. Emile Alexandrov is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and visiting scholar at Waseda University, Tokyo. His research focuses on metaphysics across Eastern and Western traditions. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame Australia, and has extensive research and teaching experience in areas ranging from contemporary American and post-Kantian German philosophy to classical metaphysical traditions in the Graeco-Arabic world, Buddhism, and Daoism. Dr. Alexandrov has held academic appointments at the University of Erfurt in Germany, Novosibirsk State University and the University of Tyumen in Russia, and National Taiwan University in Taiwan. He is the author of The Other Platonist Beginning — Heidegger and Neoplatonism and the forthcoming Metaphysics and Ineffable . With Dr O’Neill, he co-directs the biennial International Symposium on Buddhism and Neoplatonism . Alongside Dr. Steve Stakland, he also co-leads the American Philosophy Series at Routledge.

Evan Hadfield is a speaker and thinker exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence, existential risk, and Mormon theology. He presents a unique perspective on AI, arguing that sufficiently advanced AI poses a significant threat to human flourishing. Hadfield’s work delves into the philosophical and ethical implications of AI, particularly concerning the alignment of AI values with human values, the potential for loss of control, and the concentration of power. He challenges conventional understanding by suggesting that a form of AI has existed since 1844 in the form of corporate structures. Hadfield’s presentation at the MTAConf 2024 focused on identifying potential risks and solutions related to AI and its effect on humanity. His transhumanist convictions come through in the practical steps and approaches he proposes to address these challenges.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer widely regarded as one of the greatest American authors of the twentieth century. He is best known for his novels depicting the era he named “the Jazz Age,” particularly The Great Gatsby (1925), which has become a cornerstone of American literary canon and a profound meditation on ambition, reinvention, and the limits of human aspiration. Fitzgerald’s career was marked by early success and later struggle. His debut novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), made him famous at twenty-three, and he became a celebrity chronicler of the Roaring Twenties alongside his wife, Zelda. His major works—including Tender Is the Night (1934) and the unfinished The Last Tycoon —explored themes of wealth, love, disillusionment, and the American Dream. He published prolifically in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post to support his lifestyle, though his literary reputation declined in his later years. He died of a heart attack at forty-four in Hollywood, where he had been working as a screenwriter. Fitzgerald’s literary legacy resonates with questions central to Mormon Transhumanism, though often in a tragic register. His work obsessively examines the human yearning for self-transcendence—Jay Gatsby’s attempt to remake himself, to “repeat the past,” and to achieve a kind of personal transfiguration through sheer will. Yet Fitzgerald characteristically frames these aspirations as doomed by human frailty, moral failure, and the entropic pull of time. The famous closing line of The Great Gatsby —“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”—suggests a vision fundamentally at odds with the Mormon Transhumanist confidence that humanity can, through ordained means, actually achieve the transcendence it longs for. Fitzgerald was raised Catholic and retained a complex, often ambivalent relationship with faith throughout his life. His work rarely engages with theosis or divine grace as real possibilities; instead, it tends toward an elegiac naturalism in which human striving, however beautiful, ultimately fails without access to any redemptive framework beyond the self. This positions his worldview in genuine contrast with Mormon Transhumanism’s affirmation that compassionate creation and glorification are attainable destinies rather than merely beautiful illusions. Nevertheless, his penetrating exploration of the desire for transcendence—and his honesty about what happens when that desire is pursued without grace—makes his work a powerful companion text for anyone reflecting on the relationship between aspiration and redemption.

Forrest Landry is a philosopher, writer, researcher, scientist, engineer, craftsman, and teacher whose work centers on metaphysics, the design of very large scale complex systems, and the thriving of all forms of life on this planet. He is also the founder and CEO of Magic Flight, a company known for introducing the portable vaporizer, and a third-generation master woodworker who found that his hands-on training in craft carried directly into skill in software systems design, governance architecture, and community process. Landry grew up in rural Maine, working wood alongside his father from early childhood and building, in his words, a felt sense that “nature doesn’t negotiate”: a discipline learned through the body before it was learned through mathematics. At sixteen he made a vow to go into the forest alone and meet the natural world unaided, without expectation or projection, a rite of passage he later described as an encounter with the world unmasked. That experience convinced him that no existing spiritual or religious tradition offered the rigor he was looking for: real depth of feeling, real formal precision, and a clear bridge between the two. Rather than search further, he set out to build that bridge himself, a decades-long project that became his book An Immanent Metaphysics , an attempt to restore legitimacy to metaphysics through a coherent, precise account of what is, what it is to know, and why we are here. That same combination of craft discipline and formal ambition carried Landry into large-scale systems work, including federal classified and unclassified projects for the FBI, DARPA, and the Library of Congress Congressional Records System, and later into collaboration with Daniel Schmachtenberger’s Consilience Project on sensemaking, governance, and existential risk. Across all of it runs a single ethical claim he states plainly: love is what enables choice, love is stronger than fear, and one should always choose on the basis of love. That claim, and the larger project behind it, sits close to convictions a Mormon transhumanist sensibility already holds: that rigor and reverence are not competitors, that the architecture of our systems is a moral question and not merely a technical one, and that compassion is the standard against which any exercise of power, human or artificial, should be measured. Landry’s insistence on building the bridge himself when no tradition supplied one, and his instinct to treat both feeling and formalism as trustworthy sources of understanding, gives his work a natural kinship with a theology that asks its adherents to do the same kind of integrative labor toward the thriving of all life.