The Decentralization of God

Speaker 1

He esteems religion as a powerful social technology. That, like all technology, presents both risks and opportunities. And he envisions the ethical use of technology empowering humanity. To attain unprecedented magnitudes of intelligence, vitality, and compassion. He is a co-founder of the Mormon Transhumanist Association and the Christian Transhumanist Association. He also formulated the New God argument, a logical argument for faith in God that is popular among religious transhumanists. Lincoln is a founder and CEO of Thrive Us, the human enhancement company. He received an MBA from the Marriott School of Business and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Brigham Young University. Welcome, Lincoln Cannon.

Lincoln Cannon

Thank you, Carl. And I want to begin just by mentioning how And I probably, man, I didn’t think I’d be emotional about that. How good it is to be with you again. It’s been three years since the Mormon Transhumanist Association has been together in person. And I have so many my best friends in the world are here. And I thank you for coming. Thank you.

Lincoln Cannon

I just have a few minutes to speak with you today, and What I’d like to talk about are the theological and philosophical reasons Why Mormon transhumanists care so deeply about the decentralization of power. And we do. We care deeply about the decentralization of power.

Lincoln Cannon

So, first, some theology. What is God? God means a lot of things to a lot of different people. Mormons, of course, we have our Exceptional, I would say, take on what God is. And of course, at the Mormon Transhumanist Association, we focus on this exceptional view of God. Now it has deep resonances with. and a lot to thank Christianity for. But it also has evolved beyond traditional Christianity in important ways.

Lincoln Cannon

This is a picture of Jesus resurrected. And I like this picture of Jesus resurrected. Because it calls attention to something that we emphasize in Mormon theology, and that is that God is a person with a body. God is a person with a body. God is not just something ephemeral. God is not just an idea. God is not just a spirit. God may be also all of those things. But God is a person with a body. As Jesus comments in the New Testament, When he reappears in the resurrection, a spirit doesn’t have flesh and bone, as you see that I have. So in Mormonism, it’s key to understand that God is a person with a body.

Lincoln Cannon

Jesus also says, and this presents itself in the New Testament, it presents itself in the Book of Mormon. That he is both the father and the son, and boy cannot be confusing. How can one person be both the father? And the Son. Well, the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants both elaborate on that. I won’t go into great detail, but they describe the Father and they describe the Son as roles. That people, persons, individuals can fill, even simultaneously as Jesus does. And they go beyond that. They say, not only can Jesus fill these roles, But everyone has the potential to fill these divine roles. The Father, the Son, even Heavenly Mother is a role that we have potential to fill per Mormon theology.

Lincoln Cannon

That leads to a second aspect of theology in Mormonism that I want to emphasize, and that is that in Mormon theology, God is a person, but God is not just one person. In Mormon theology, God is a community. And this plays out in a whole bunch of interesting ways. One way it plays out in the New Testament is that God Is a body, or as Paul says, the body of Christ. And in the body of Christ, there are many members with diverse gifts, diverse capacities. Diverse abilities and interests and desires. But they all need each other and they all work together as the body of Christ, as the body of God. They are all part of God.

Lincoln Cannon

In the Doctrine and Covenants, Joseph Smith elaborates on this, and he says, and it’s a little bit related to this picture that I’ll explain in just a second. That the same sociality that exists among us now as human beings here on earth in the 2020s exists among the gods. Except that it’s coupled with eternal glory, whatever that might be. Use your imagination. This right here is a picture of A design for Zion that early Mormons put together. This idea that Not only is God a community that already exists, but God is also a community that we should be building and we should become a part of. human potential is to become as God is. Or as Joseph Smith put it, we’ve got to learn how to be gods the same as all other gods have done before. And part of that, of course, is cultivation of virtues in oneself. compassion, creativity, and such. But it’s also building of real tangible communities, as is evidenced by this effort.

Lincoln Cannon

And then we read in the Pearl of Great Price another really striking instance where God is described as a community. Abraham gives the story of the creation of the world, and at the beginning of that story, instead of saying, God created the heavens and the earth, as it does in Genesis. In the book of Abraham, it says, the gods, plural, created the heavens and the earth. And lest you think that was Joseph innovating all on his lonesome. Or Abraham, as you might understand it, they get that from the book of Genesis, the original Hebrew. If you read the book of Genesis, the original Hebrew, the very first line of the Bible. talks about a plurality of gods. The word Elohim is used, not Eloi, which would have been a singular god. Elohim, the gods, created the heavens and the earth. You can go check the Hebrew on that. It’s an interesting thing to look at.

Lincoln Cannon

That leads to a third aspect of Mormon godhood that I want to call to our attention. And this is perhaps one that Is most complex and mysterious, and talked about in hushed tones among Mormon theologians with excitement in their eyes. And that is God. In the scriptures, is described not only as a person and not only as a community, but God is described as a world, even. In Mormon scripture, and frankly, in the Bible. A great example of that in the Bible you can find in the book of Acts, chapter 17. It says there that we live and we move and we have our being in God. Joseph Smith in the Doctrine and Covenants elaborates on that. If you go to section 88, it’s a. It’s a beautiful elaboration. He talks about the cosmos in which we live, and he draws our attention to the heavens. And he says, if you look. At the sun, if you look at the moon, if you look at the stars, you have seen God moving in majesty. But maybe you haven’t understood. Now, I’m not going to tell you for sure what the one right interpretation of that is. I think there might not be just one right interpretation of that. But I’m going to tell you that the scriptures do talk about God in a way. That suggests more even than just a person and more even than just a community. Not that those are just on their own, those are wonderful, but there’s more going on.

Lincoln Cannon

And then in the Pearl of Great Price, we have an interesting account of the earth weeping, bemoaning the ways that we mistreat each other as humans. And hoping for, praying for a better day when we don’t any longer do such things. I think a something that should come out clearly From the Mormon account of Godhood, is that God is decentralized in our theology. Now, the argument can be made. That we inherited this from Christianity. And I think that would be an accurate argument, although some maybe more fundamentalistly inclined Christians would disagree with that. But God is decentralized, and I think it’s really important that God is decentralized in Mormon theology. And I’m going to talk now about some philosophical reasons why I think that’s so important on a practical level.

Lincoln Cannon

I’m going to draw on some arguments from the philosophy of artificial intelligence. And these are a little bit technical. I apologize if If I don’t do them justice in explaining every detail and every question that might come to your mind, but I’ll do the best I can in just a couple of minutes here. The first part of this is called the semi-orthogonality hypothesis. The basic idea of this is that intelligence And final goals are orthogonal. You cannot predict one based on the other. Some people think that because God is super intelligent, Or a machine intelligence might become super intelligent that they would necessarily be good just because they’re more intelligent. It doesn’t play out that way in the real world. There are very intelligent persons, communities, machines, if you think of intelligence broadly. Very intelligent that do very evil things. Intelligence and goals, final goals, are orthogonal.

Lincoln Cannon

Second principle, the convergence hypothesis, despite the fact that final goals and intelligence are orthogonal, instrumental goals for all intelligences of all degrees of power Converge, tend to converge around resources. Why? Well, because we need to survive, and we all need Approximately the same things to survive. We need energy of some sort or another to perform the calculations that our intelligence is working on. Whether we are a super intelligent machine of the future, whether we’re a human right now, whether we’re an ant right now, whether we’re God. Instrumental goals will converge around resources.

Lincoln Cannon

That brings us to another hypothesis that because instrumental goals converge around resources, Although we can’t predict the final goals of an intelligence, we may be able to predict and cultivate certain kinds of behavior for intelligences in general. By operating on how they have access to resources. And this leads right into the topic of what we’ve been discussing in our conference today. By ensuring that access to resources is evened out and decentralized. If we do that, Some interesting game theory takes effect just naturally and probabilistically, not absolutely, but probabilistically, where there’s approximate equality in power, proximity in power. Intelligences have high degrees of interest to cooperate, high incentives to cooperate. But where there’s disparities in power, All bets are off. They might cooperate, they might not. They might coerce each other, they might not. We can’t say. So,

Lincoln Cannon

So, this becomes particularly important to recognize as we contemplate the future, as we contemplate increasing intelligence, as we contemplate increasing human intelligence, increasing Machine intelligence, and as we contemplate our capacity, per Mormon theology, to become as God is, how do we ensure that we do this in the best way, that has the best outcomes? And per these hypotheses I’ve shared with you, the best way of doing that, the most probable way, the most dependable way, is to decentralize power, which incentivizes cooperation and makes the pursuit Of resources less likely to result in coercion, more likely to result in cooperation. Sorry, that’s some thick philosophy. We can talk about it more later. End result of that. They have some old slides. I’ll just talk about it.

Lincoln Cannon

End result of that: in the New Testament, there are two kinds of gods that are described. That might surprise you, but this is done by Paul. Paul talks about one kind of God, more of a would-be God in Paul’s assessment, and I agree with him, that would raise itself above all else that’s called God, declaring itself God. And he calls that God the son of perdition. Or maybe another word for that that we would use is Satan. Think about that for a second: a God that would raise itself above all else that’s called God, declaring itself God. This centralized power is described in the New Testament as the son of perdition or Satan.

Lincoln Cannon

In contrast, Paul describes another God, and this one, I agree, merits the title God. He describes Christ as a God that would raise us together in the glory of God, if so be that we would suffer with Him. If so be that we would suffer with him, if so be that we participate empathically with the role, the engagement, the virtues of Godhood. Of those two gods, in my mind, it’s very clear, and in most Mormons’ minds, it’s very clear. I think in most of humanity’s minds, it’s probably very clear, which Itch merits worship. And which does not. Christ merits our worship. A God that would decentralize power and share with us, transform us, help us become as God is, merits our worship because the worship Of this kind of God is the worship of emulation, the worship of becoming, the worship of being better people. The worship of being better friends, the worship of having better relationships, making a better world, making better communities, having better environments.

Lincoln Cannon

How do we do all this in detail? Well, we’ve heard a lot of people talk about that today with a lot of beautiful ideas. and we need to keep talking about them. But one thing that we need to do to make it most probable have the highest potential to maximize the development of cooperation and compassion. is to decentralize that power and then do our best to keep decentralizing it. I think I might be out of time and not have any for questions. I’m way out of time. So this evening, thank you.