The Urgency of Superintelligent Communion
Lincoln Cannon is an American philosopher and technologist who co-founded the Mormon Transhumanist Association in 2006, serving as its president from 2006 to 2016. He is a leading advocate of technological evolution and postsecular religion, combining software engineering expertise with degrees in philosophy and business. ¶ Cannon is also a founder and board member of the Christian Transhumanist Association. He formulated the New God Argument, a logical argument for faith in God that has become popular among religious transhumanists. His academic work includes “Mormonism Mandates Transhumanism” published in Religion and Human Enhancement: Death, Values, and Morality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and “Transfigurism: A Future of Religion as Exemplified by Religious Transhumanists” published in The Transhumanism Handbook (Springer Verlag, 2019). ¶ Mormon transhumanism, as articulated by Cannon, holds that humanity should learn how to be compassionate creators. This idea is central to the Mormon theological tradition, which provides a religious framework consistent with naturalism and supportive of human transformation. Cannon’s work bridges religious faith with scientific advancement, advocating for the ethical use of technology to extend human abilities in ways consistent with a religious worldview.
The single most under-appreciated idea in Mormon Transhumanism is that theosis is communal, not individual – and that this distinction is not a theological nicety but an existential imperative. When Lorenzo Snow distilled our theological tradition into his famous couplet, most hearers fixated on the individual trajectory: I become like God. But the deeper claim is that communities become like God.
Elohim
Theosis is not solitary. It is collaborative. It is the courageous, compassionate, creative work of beings who choose to integrate their interests and amplify their capacities together. The communal dimension is precisely that which most Transhumanists miss when they imagine enhancement as a private upgrade, and that which most Mormons miss when they imagine exaltation as a personal reward.
This matters now more than ever because the central risk of our technological moment is not that machines become too intelligent. It is that machine intelligence diverges from human interests. And the antidote is not retreat, but rather intimate integration.
Yet integration without shared purpose would be insanity or self-destruction. And that which directs integration toward genuine thriving is precisely the communal coherence that religion, at its most strenuous, has always cultivated. Religion is the most powerful social technology. The question is not whether we should wield it, but how.
Postsecular religion holds this together: refusing both secular dismissal of the sacred and fundamentalist dismissal of inquiry. The New God Argument formalizes it: God emerges not as mere abstraction but as the materially embodied superhumanity into which we are invited together. That “together” is the part we keep under-appreciating. Individual enhancement without communal theosis is just a more sophisticated form of selfishness, which, scaled to superintelligent capacity, is the ultimate extinction risk.
So when I say communities become like God, I’m describing the most urgent project that I’ve imagined: directing our most powerful social technology toward increasingly universal interests, integrating human and machine intelligence to the practical limits of cooperation in compassion, with the courage to refuse both nihilistic despair and fundamentalist escapism. Our present opportunity to shape the emergence of superhuman intelligence on Earth, to domesticate it toward communion rather than domination, will not persist indefinitely. It is passing. We should act accordingly.
Syndicated from Lincoln Cannon.