transhumanism

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.

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.