The Horror of (Mormon) Transhumanism
Jacob Baker presents a philosophical challenge to transhumanism through the lens of "cosmic pessimism," drawing on thinkers like Eugene Thacker, Thomas Ligotti, and Ray Brassier who question whether the universe is fundamentally indifferent to human existence. He introduces Thacker's distinction between "the world" (as experienced by humans), "the earth" (in itself), and "the planet" (explicitly indifferent and dangerous to humanity)—arguing that transhumanism's optimism about human potential may lack sufficient grounding. Baker extends this critique to Mormonism's inherent optimism, suggesting that if becoming a god means eternally sharing in creation's suffering rather than transcending it, then deification itself becomes "somewhat horrific to contemplate"—not as an anti-transhumanist argument, but as a challenge meant to strengthen and refine the philosophy.
Jacob Baker is a scholar of philosophy of religion and theology who completed his doctoral studies at Claremont Graduate University’s School of Religion. His dissertation explored the inherent unthinkability of the problem of evil in philosophy and theology, arguing that this unthinkability is central to its status as a problem. ¶ Baker’s graduate work spans an impressive range of philosophical and theological traditions. He studied continental philosophy under Ingolf Dalferth, examining figures such as Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Tillich. His paper Heidegger and Wittgenstein: Worldliness and Surveyable Representation in the Architecture of the Ordinary argued that both philosophers share a fundamental orientation toward allowing phenomena to show themselves without philosophical interference. His work on Nietzsche explored how the philosopher’s critique of truth was ultimately in service of affirming and enhancing life itself. ¶ In phenomenology, Baker engaged deeply with Jean-Luc Marion’s work, arguing that love is the privileged theme of phenomenology and that Marion’s phenomenology of givenness can reveal how love enables the other to give herself as herself in particularity and unsubstitutability. His paper on Badiou and Zizek’s readings of St. Paul explored how these atheist philosophers converge on understanding Pauline love as work, labor, and struggle—far removed from sentimental notions. ¶ Baker has contributed significantly to Mormon intellectual discourse. His article The Grandest Principle of the Gospel: Christian Nihilism, Sanctified Activism, and Eternal Progression appeared in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (Vol. 41, No. 3, 2008), examining how early twentieth-century Mormon intellectuals developed eternal progression as an existential response to what they perceived as the nihilistic stasis of traditional Christian heaven. In Element (Vol. 4, Issue 1, 2008), his essay The Shadow of the Cathedral argued that “open system” approaches to systematic theology can accommodate Mormon continuing revelation. ¶ His work on Joseph Smith, written under Richard L. Bushman, explored the connection between Smith’s personal experiences with friendship and his developing theology of sealing, arguing that the “welding link” concept emerged from Smith’s vision of uniting all humanity across time through bonds of love. Baker also examined whether Mormon theology can be meaningfully articulated within panentheistic discourse, suggesting that “pansyntheism”—meaning “God with us” rather than “God in us”—better accommodates Mormon emphases on divine personhood and the distinct identities of God and humans. ¶ In process theology and medieval theology, Baker examined how panentheism provides a framework capable of unifying disparate experiences—religious and secular, scientific and theological—into a coherent whole. His work on medieval atonement theory argued against contemporary calls to subordinate atonement to incarnation, demonstrating through Anselm, Abelard, Aquinas, and Bonaventure that these doctrines are mutually interdependent. ¶ During his presentation at the MTAConf 2016, he offered philosophical challenges to transhumanist thought through the lens of cosmic pessimism. His engagement with transhumanist literature reflects his broader interest in how philosophy and theology address questions of human potential, meaning, and transcendence.
Transcript
Speaker 1
Really glad that Jacob pulled out all the stuffs to make it here today. He is a PhD student in philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont Graduate University. He is working on a doctoral dissertation that explores the inherent unthinkability of the problem of evil in philosophy and theology as central to its status as a problem. I’m really interested in hearing what he has to say about the horror of transhumanism at the limits of thought. And I think it’ll be a very provocative and interesting discussion. Jacob.
Jacob Baker
Alright, I’ll go To kind of see it here-ish, is that better? All right, so I had an interesting day. While he’s pulling this up, I’ll tell you about it a little bit. I’m going to be speaking on something called cosmic pessimism, and my day kind of reflected that because on my way here, I got pulled over by a cop for speeding. And then, while I was out here kind of finishing up a couple of things for my slides, I got a call saying my daughter might have gone into like a diabetic coma or something. Which was news to us that she might be diabetic in some fashion. So went to the hospital. She ended up being okay. They’re still running some tests. She was recently released. And then I finally got the last slide put in about 15 minutes ago. And it started out being a somewhat of a pessimistic day. Although cosmic pessimism is a little bit different.
Jacob Baker
So I have a provocative title, as one should have, probably, when presenting something to a group. It’s not. It might sound like uh something that is anti-transhumanist. Can that be seen? You okay? Randall, you okay? It might be both. This one too? It’s not anti-transhumanism. The main reason why it’s not is because I don’t know a whole lot about transhumanism. So I couldn’t possibly. Speak on the opposite of transhumanism per se, or be against transhumanism. Nevertheless, this presentation is kind of. A philosophical challenge to transhumanism. But I mean that in the greatest possible respect because, of course, we want to be challenged to the hilt. With our philosophies and theologies. Not in the sense that they could be destroyed, but they could be strengthened and revised. to fit with both of our need both our needs and our reality. So in that sense, it’s not anti transhumanist, but it is what I think is a challenge to one of the philosophical or part of the philosophical core of what I understand transhumanism to be, which probably isn’t what everyone else understands transhumanism to be.
Jacob Baker
I was actually invited to speak by Carl, who we have some interaction on social media. And I’ve always been intrigued by this group. But I always hung out with like the humanities people and they’re actually going on right now, but I shunned them this time around in favor of this. And in so doing, I was able to do some research on transhumanism, obviously just bare bones. I read Lincoln’s article in Last year, that you published. I don’t remember the venue, which I thought was fascinating. I read the frequently asked questions section of Humanity Plus and a couple of other articles I found in links. And transhumanism ended up being something quite different from what I had imagined, and it was far more detailed and had a lot more depth and breadth. than I had originally thought, particularly in its anticipation of some of the dangers of developing into post-humanity. And what could be some of the dangers from the human race, not just because of the nature of humanity, but due specifically to technological development, which I thought was really prescient.
Jacob Baker
Okay, just a little bit of background of myself. As Carl said, I am working on a PhD and have been for millennia. in philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont Graduate University. As far as I know, this is kind of a unique PhD, which isn’t good for like working and eating. But it’s great if that is your thing and that you like to study and talk about. And it is. It won’t be something I can eat with, but I thoroughly enjoy the subject, and you study philosophy from ancient philosophy to the present, as well as theology from the beginning of Christianity to the present. My advisor there is his name is Ingolf Dalforth. He’s the most brilliant human being I’ve ever met and knows everything there is to know about philosophy and other things that no one knows as well. And I’ve been very fortunate to study under him and to work with him while at Claremont.
Jacob Baker
Now, Claremont is a unique place if you’re a Mormon, because that’s where the At that time, at least, the largest Mormon studies program was inaugurated under Richard Bushman. And while I was there, I took philosophy and theology classes and Mormon studies classes. And it was a fantastic experience. I would replace all of CES with the Claremont experience if I could. And I promise, like, we would be global as a church in, like, a year. It was a fantastic, challenging, dazzling experience. I’m really sad that I’m not there anymore. I’m in the dissertation phase, so. I don’t have an excuse to live near the campus.
Jacob Baker
A little bit about what I studied. I studied both analytic and continental thought and philosophy, and I won’t get into the major distinctions there, but my advisor is kind of an expert in both. And so um uh I studied in both areas under him, phenomenology, theology, particularly postmodern theology, which I think personally is kind of where th any theology that sh that intersects with what I understand transhumanism to be would kind of fall under the postmodern theology rubric. Um I studied process thought. I don’t know if process thought Randy Nose process, though. If that’s been talked about here a whole lot, I haven’t unfortunately been able to be here very much today. There’s a lot of resonances, and I would love to see a presentation or maybe even put one together myself at some point. Between transhumanism and process thought, which is a very developmental philosophy that’s focused more on becoming rather than being, on the transformative nature of God. And humanity. And Mormon studies, I’ll apply some of that a little bit later in the presentation.
Jacob Baker
Where I talk about just briefly kind of the horror of Mormonism as it relates to the horror of philosophy, the horror of transhumanism. And specifically, I studied the problem of evil, which has always really fascinated me. I took a seminar on the problem of evil while I was there. The problem of evil is essentially trying to wrap our minds around What in traditional Christianity is given to us as a benevolent, all-powerful God, and yet there exists Waves upon waves of evil and suffering in the world. And so the problem is, how do we reconcile both of those things? And of course, throughout the centuries, there have been various ways that theologians and others have sought to reconcile God’s love and power with the amount of evil that’s in the world. And my particular angle on this relates to my presentation. And that’s the fact that there’s an inherent unthinkability, or there are limits to thought. And this is part of what I’ll get at with the horror of philosophy in particular. And those limits to thought compound the problem of evil. In particular ways, so that it becomes difficult to think the problem because there are these boundaries or horizons that we can’t seem to get past. And so, while most theologians and philosophers will focus on specific concrete things in Scripture or in the world, or specific logical propositions and things of that nature, my focus in my dissertation is on thought itself and how thought limits our ability to conceive of the problem as it’s been traditionally formulated. Okay. I won’t be able to get into that too much, but that’s how it relates to the current presentation. Okay.
Jacob Baker
Okay, now I’m gonna give a I felt I had to give just a kind of a bare bones. Okay, this is the this is the hum transhumanism that I’m working with. I imagine there’s many transhumanisms out there. And I’m just going as basic as I possibly can, mostly because that’s all I can do for the moment. But also hopefully because it will engender wider agreement. In general, over what transhumanism is, so that as I talk about it later on, that’ll be the baseline. And this is just taken directly from the frequently asked questions. At Humanity Plus, where they kind of boil transhumanism down to two basic things, and then they have, of course, they elaborate on those at length. The first being the intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging. and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.
Jacob Baker
And second, the study of the ramifications, promises, and potential dangers of technologies That will enable us to overcome fundamental human limitations and the related study of the ethical matters involved in developing and using such technologies. And that’s actually the the ways in which I’ve heard about transhumanism in the past don’t really focus on on point two uh as much. And I think point two is absolutely essential because the typical criticism from someone that will hear about transhumanism in the first place is, well, yeah, but What about technology that could cause the extinction of every living thing? Or is it moral to want it to develop into something beyond where we are right now? And who gets left out of that? Right? And who gets included in it? Well, those questions obviously have been discussed from the beginning of even the inklings of something like transhumanism. And they’ve kind of grown with and developed with that philosophy as it’s grown and developed. So, this isn’t obviously a new area, and I’m not going to get too heavily into those things because I don’t feel like I’m qualified to speak about the intricacies of the ethics of post-human development.
Jacob Baker
But what I want to call attention to just briefly with these definitions is how affirming and positive they are, which is great. Right? And obviously, that’s going to be the context of when I talk about human thought from a more pessimistic angle. And again, not to endorse Some sort of pessimism, as like that’s my personal philosophy about the world, necessarily, but to throw out what I think are the more provocative, in-depth challenges to a view that is inherently positive about humanity, which I think transhumanism is. I mean, it knows it understands there’s dangers associated with this sort of thinking, but at the same time, I think overall, it’s a very affirmative philosophy about the human race and its future. Okay.
Jacob Baker
Okay, um a few books that I’ll be going that are kind of my baseline for this. Okay. This is the Horror of Philosophy series by an author by the name of Eugene Thacker, who is a professor at the New School in New York. Yeah. Okay. Oh, yeah. Actually, I didn’t notice that. Good. Good thing I’m about eight minutes away from the end. Excellent. Okay. No, this is actually good. This is not the beginning of the, I mean, this is probably a third of the way through, so you’re good. Okay, now these books basically form the baseline of what I’m going to talk about today. Okay.
Jacob Baker
And they basically hit on what he calls the horror philosophy, which we’ll talk about in a moment, which he looks at through philosophy proper, supernatural horror and fiction, and a kind of a combination of the two in the final book. Okay.
Jacob Baker
Also, Knihil Unbound from Ray Brassier, which looks at nihilism, one of the most important books on nihilism in the last 50 years, easily, and also one of the most difficult philosophy books I’ve ever read. Which is why I’ve started over four times on it, because it’s really hard.
Jacob Baker
And then finally, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race from Thomas Legotti, who’s a horror writer. This is an unflinchingly Despairingly pessimistic book, which I don’t recommend you read if you’re in a particular mood. He’s completely unsparing in his understanding as humanity as inherently worthless and inherently meaningless. And I agree, I laughed as well when I read the back cover. But he makes a compelling argument. Not in the sense that now I’m persuaded that everything’s meaningless, I’m going to throw myself off a cliff. But in the sense that it’s a challenge to how we develop meaning in human communities. Okay.
Jacob Baker
Okay. The world, according to Thacker, Ligati, Brassier, and other nihilists, is inherently unthinkable on a lot of levels. One, because there’s so much about the world that continues to be strange. So we learn more and more about the world scientifically. We talk about our lives and the world narratively. We paint the world through art, and we develop greater and greater understandings of the world, but that doesn’t seem to erase the strange. In fact, in some ways, it makes the strangeness that much more poignant. And that’s much more visible to us. There’s a mystery and strangeness about the world, which isn’t necessarily good or bad, but that remains with us. And so, in that sense, the world isn’t completely thinkable. Okay.
Jacob Baker
The other thing about the unthinkableness of the world is how we encounter catastrophe. We’re constantly being we’re constantly confronting climate change and wars and other kinds of disasters, pot potential cosmic disasters. In theory, we could come up with technology that could help mitigate against those sorts of things. But generally speaking, Anything that’s living is constantly being confronted with its own extinction. Whether it develops technology that causes its own extinction or not. So these two things kind of make up how the world is ultimately unthinkable.
Jacob Baker
Now the horror philosophy is essentially the thought that the baseline principle of philosophy, after Leibniz and Kant in particular, is the principle of sufficient reason. Which essentially states that there’s a reason why everything happens. Okay? That’s the basis of thinking: that there’s a cause for everything. Now, we might not know the cause right now, but We are absolutely certain that there is one, and that given enough time, given enough technology, given enough thought and research, we’ll figure out what that cause is. Or, if there are causes that are mysterious to us, we’ll understand what those are. The horror of philosophy is to consider that the principle of sufficient reason is false. that there is not a cause for everything that happens, or there’s not one that we could possibly know. There might be uh we might understand intermittent causes, but ultimate causes or other kinds of causes We couldn’t possibly know. So, the principle of sufficient reason, if it’s undermined, then everything that follows comes into question. Okay, and then finally the idea of extinction.
Jacob Baker
Now, this isn’t just the idea that no matter what we do. According to some astrophysicists, we’re all going to die, even if we somehow figure out immortality. The universe is going to have its heat death or the big crunch or whatever. Okay? We got. Maybe if we’re lucky 100 trillion years. And then we’re toast. And it doesn’t matter what we develop into. At some point, that thing that we develop into is going to go away and never return. Now, I don’t have time to get into the nuances of this. Ray Brassier’s book, Nihil Unbound, is all about the idea of extinction. And it’s ridiculously complex. But needless to say, that’s part of the unthinkability of the world: this thought of that no matter what we do, we can’t ultimately stave off extinction. Okay, question nihilism.
Jacob Baker
This is Brass here. The unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent. To our existence and oblivious to the values and meanings which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable. Okay, this is the thought which I think I connect up Okay, on the next slide. This is the thought essentially that there is a reality out there that no matter how we Manipulate it and use it to our benefit to further our own existence or our own understanding of the world, that is utterly indifferent to us. And that, put in perspective, makes our existence much more humble than it really is. Okay, and our place in the universe, etc. Okay, I’m going to kind of move somewhat quickly through some of these.
Jacob Baker
Okay, now I probably won’t get be able to read this entire quote, but basically, Logotti here, I’m comparing the first two. Notions of transhumanism at the very beginning, which I said were very affirmative, very positive, with Legati’s thought. And Ligati specifically speaks about transhumanism, which I didn’t actually know until about four days ago. When I got to this part of the book. Okay, and he has like 12 pages on transhumanism, which, wow, really. Okay. And he has a lot of different problems with transhumanism, obviously. But his baseline problem with transhumanism is essentially that it’s too optimistic, that it has no real basis for its optimism. Okay. I mean, it feels good to be optimistic like that, and we want to I we don’t even know how human communities could progress without some kind of optimism that they’ll survive and get better. But nevertheless, he says, yeah, well, that’s a nice feeling, that’s a great distraction. But the reality could be that none of this warrants the optimism that is clearly inherent in a philosophy like transhumanism. Okay?
Jacob Baker
Which leads briefly, kind of a preface into the end, which is the inherent optimism of Mormonism, right? Which is sometimes. Irritatingly optimist. Right? I mean, so thoroughgoingly optimist that sometimes you wonder if Mormon thought can really deal with reality on the ground, right? And I ran into this all the time doing in Mormon studies classes, you know, where we where we talk about various authors, we talk about, particularly in philosophy, the suffering. Of the world, and then we talk about, we bring in some Mormon elements about suffering. And the best we could get to was: you know, God suffers as well. It’s another process theology commonality, right? But we couldn’t really ever get past that kind of surface detail: that, yeah, God suffers too. But how awful is that suffering? Right? I mean, would that change God’s conception of the world? Or is God, in a sense, suffers awfully, but at the same time is indifferent enough to be able to function as a God. Right? So he’s able to kind of just put it in the back of his brain just enough that he’s able to be the God that we need God to be. Okay. We’ll get a little more into this at the very end, particularly if there’s any time at all.
Jacob Baker
Okay, now three concepts from Eugene Thacker, okay, that he wants us to think about. The first is the concept of the world. And the world is the human world, the world for us, the world as it exists for our benefit and our understanding. This is the world that we deal with. And we often want to think that this is the only world. The world that is to our benefit and that we understand through human eyes. But there’s also what he calls the earth. Which is the world in itself. Okay? That’s geology and meteorology and zoology. Okay? The world as is experienced by non-humans. And finally, there’s the planet, which is the world without us. Now, the world without us is a subset of the world in itself. Obviously, it’s not experienced by humans. But the world without us is explicitly indifferent to humanity, so much so that it’s dangerous to humanity. And this is where a lot of the strangeness and catastrophe part of the unthinkability of the world I already talked about comes in. Okay, kind of have to move along a little quickly.
Jacob Baker
Okay, this is Lugati again on cosmic pessimism. I’m going to read this one. This is pretty important. As for us humans, we reek of our own sense of being something. Nature proceeds by blunders, that is its way, it is also ours. So, if we have blundered by regarding consciousness as a blunder, why make a fuss over it? Our self removal from this planet would still be a magnificent move, a feat so luminous it would bedim the sun. What do we have to lose? No evil would attend our departure from this world, and the many evils we have known would go extinct along with us. So, why put off what would be the most laudable master stroke of our existence and the only one? Okay, right? Okay, but this is important because this, if you could take the opposite of transhumanism, at least as I’ve understood it, and kind of disseminate it into one paragraph, that might be what this paragraph looks like. Okay? Okay, this is I mean, this is essentially saying, um what? No, you’ve won, yeah. Okay, but that’s but that’s where the battle is, that’s where my point is, right? That’s that’s where the philosophical rubber meets the road. Okay, it’s not in the details, in the technology or the ethics. It’s in the actual actual logical feasibility. Okay. Let me just move to the end here since time is technically gone. Okay. Thank you. Okay.
Jacob Baker
Cosmic pessimism. This is kind of the same. Now, this is Thacker, who basically says: look. Pessimism in America especially is completely foreign, right? We can’t even begin to confront the pessimist without wanting to exile him or her immediately. Right? The pessimist has no place in our society whatsoever. To live in such a culture is to constantly live in the shadow of an obligatory optimism, a novel type of coercion that is pathologized. Early on in child education in the assessment, do not play, does not like to play with others. Okay. Okay. Oops, that’s a weird. Slide. Okay, there, okay, two more slides. Okay.
Jacob Baker
So the horror philosophy, this is kind of the distilled Only in that brief moment of absolute uncertainty when both options seem equally plausible or implausible, when neither thought can be accepted or rejected, when everything can be explained and nothing can be explained. Only in that moment do we really have this horror of philosophy, this questioning of the principle of sufficient reason. Okay, so Thackeray wants to kind of twist the knife a little bit. To say we are often too optimistic in our optimism, too optimistic in what we think we understand about the world and the whole causal chain that gets to our ability to understand in the first place. Okay, so the horror of transhumanism, if you were to overlay that onto transhumanism, is the uncertain valuation of the worth of humanity.
Jacob Baker
Now Lugati will say humanity is ult totally worthless, or at least no more or less worthless than anything else, right? But there’s also gradations here as well. Thacker would probably say, oh, we’re still worth something. But far, far less than we want to believe that we’re worth. Particularly when you put us into the mix with the world in itself and the world without us. Okay, as we ultimately have to do. So that would be what Thacker would say. And finally, the horror of Mormonism.
Jacob Baker
Now, this is Ligati quoting one of his favorite authors who’s even more pessimistic than he is, if you can believe it. Okay? And this will be my last point. Okay, what is the horror of Mormonism as it relates to itself theologically? If something like God exists or once existed, what would he not be capable of doing or undoing? Why should God not want to be done with himself? Because, unbeknownst to us, suffering was the essence of his being. Why should he not have brought forth a universe that is one great puppet show? It is destined by him to be crunched or scattered until an absolute nothingness has been established. Is it really kind of of this earth in the sense that God is corporeal? And that God suffers in the same way that we suffer, and importantly, that if we were to become gods, would that really entail just. An eternity of reproduction and dancing and singing together? Or would it be doing what God and Christ have been doing? For as long as we’ve known about, which is sitting in the blood and the mud with humanity and trying to save some people If that’s what gods do, and that’s what we would do, then what do we have to look forward to as immortal beings is essentially a life of suffering. Okay, now that suffering might be couched in a huge context of meaning, and there might be joy associated with it, which we couldn’t understand without the suffering, etc. But nevertheless, that kind of deification is somewhat horrific, the horror, right, to contemplate. If being a God means anything at all like we understand God to be, and if being God means that you are with your creation in all of their horrific suffering. Then there’s not a place of rest that we have to look forward to, at least not ultimately. Okay? And that kind of bleeds into this principle of is the principle of sufficient reason sufficient? Well, maybe not. Is immortality a good? Maybe it isn’t. Or maybe it’s an inevitability, and we just have to get used to the fact that it’s an inevitability and it’s not a good. Okay, so that’s that’s basically it. Thanks.