# Brent Allsop

*1959–present*

**Brent Allsop** (b. 1959) is an American technologist, transhumanist activist, and co-founder of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, whose career has been shaped by a sustained conviction that the most important questions about consciousness, identity, and human destiny are both scientific and spiritual.

Allsop is a Senior Software Engineer at 3M Health Information Systems and the founder of Canonizer.com, a collaborative wiki-survey platform launched in 2006 and designed to help communities build genuine consensus on contested questions—from philosophy of mind to ethics to emerging technology. His professional life has run in parallel with decades of advocacy for life extension and transhumanist causes, and he has been a founding voice in the MTA since its inception.

At the center of Allsop’s intellectual work is a serious engagement with the philosophy of consciousness—specifically the problem of qualia, or the subjective qualities of experience. He has developed a theoretical framework for scientifically detecting and measuring qualia, arguing that bridging the explanatory gap between brain states and conscious experience requires new mapping functions and, ultimately, direct brain-to-brain connections that allow individuals to share elemental experiences. His vision of mind uploading follows from this: not a copy-and-delete procedure but a gradual transition of experiential continuity into enhanced digital form. This work finds a natural resonance with Joseph Smith’s teaching that “all spirit is matter”—a naturalist theology that Allsop has taken seriously as a framework for understanding what spiritual engineering and consciousness uploading might actually involve.

Allsop has also applied his consensus-building instincts to the MTA itself, presenting the 2012 member survey and reflecting on what distinguishes the Association from other transhumanist communities: a spirit of mutual support and collaborative inquiry rather than fractiousness. His Canonizer platform embodies the same aspiration at scale—enabling individuals to identify trusted experts and survey their collective views, so that the expanding moral landscape of technological power can be navigated with wisdom rather than paralysis. The emerging expert consensus on representational qualia theory, he has noted, aligns surprisingly well with 19th-century Mormon descriptions of consciousness and spirit—a convergence he regards not as coincidence but as evidence that prophetic and scientific inquiry can illuminate the same truths from different directions.