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.

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.