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Lincoln Cannon

Lincoln Cannon

著者： Lincoln Cannon
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Lincoln Cannon is a technologist and philosopher, and leading voice of Mormon Transhumanism.2025-2026 Lincoln Cannon スピリチュアリティ
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  • TrueChristian® Hypocrisy

    TrueChristian® Hypocrisy
    2026/08/27
    I received a Google Alert for “[Christians Only] WDYT of Christian Transhumanism Association?: r/TrueChristian - Reddit.” Christians only? Okay. I’m Christian. So I clicked on the link and read the thread. The “Christian” originator tells of going down the proverbial “rabbit hole” and learning about Christian Transhumanism. Although confused and inviting thoughts, he’s “pretty sure” that the common Christian Transhumanist idea of resurrecting the dead is “heresy.” An “Eastern Orthodox” commenter confirms, “just by seeing their name I know they’re at least heretics or not even Christians.” A “Christian non-nationalist” shares, “My first concern is their participatory technological language around resurrection.” He continues, “I don’t read the Bible as suggesting that this is anything other than a work of our awesome creator.” Oh, and by the way, “I’m also concerned about the apparent composition … including Mormon Transhumanists and secular-adjacent futurist writers …” And “Non-Denominational” concludes, feigning imitation of Christian Transhumanists, “We want to disrespect God’s image by enhancing human bodies essentially mutilating our own bodies that are made in the image of the God we do claim to love!” Hmm. So much nonsense. Maybe I should respond, I thought. So I tried. Jesus: Raise the dead. TrueChristian: Heresy. But it didn’t work. A bot quickly informed me that my comment had been removed. Why? I was commenting “without flair identifying [me] as a trinitarian believer.” The bot also explained how I’m not a Christian. I “may not utilize a Christian flair,” it informed me, if I “deny the Trinity or other beliefs expressed in the Nicene Creed.” And even if I choose to use the flair to identify myself as a Christian, I’m “still not allowed to post in a Christians Only thread.” The bot concluded with instructions about how to add flair below “__ followers of Christ are online.” So here we are. TrueChristian® won’t receive my message. But you, dear reader, you’re receiving it now, whether you like it or not. Of course it’s nothing new. TrueChristian® has been demonizing me for decades. And they’ll probably continue for decades more. Not so secretly, I hope so because it’s free advertising. But I do wish to call special attention to this particular exchange. It encapsulates, so well, the fundamental hypocrisy of TrueChristian®. They claim to be Christian, which above all connotes reverence for Jesus and the Bible. And yet their words implicitly reject both to an extent that would be surprising if it weren’t so common. “Do the works you see me do,” says Jesus in the Bible, as he raises the dead repeatedly. But the first concern of TrueChristian® is participatory language around resurrection. “Raise the dead,” says Jesus in the Bible, as if his example isn’t enough. But TrueChristian® is pretty sure that’s heresy. “Touch me and see,” says Jesus in the Bible, appearing bodily as if from nowhere after having been crucified. But enhancing human bodies is mutilation for TrueChristian®. So much hypocrisy. Meanwhile, I’m not a Christian because Mormons don’t revere the Nicene Creed. And Transhumanists are just yuck. Too little Nicea. Too much Jesus, Bible, and yuck. No wonder “__ followers of Christ are online.”
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  • In Memory of Mike LaTorra

    In Memory of Mike LaTorra
    2026/09/06
    My friend Mike LaTorra died on Wednesday, 2 September 2026. He taught English at New Mexico State University for more than two decades. And he was ordained a Zen Buddhist priest, presiding for a time over the Daibutsuji Zen Temple in Las Cruces. Mike also served on the board of directors of the World Transhumanist Association when they voted to affiliate with the Mormon Transhumanist Association. That was July 2006. The Mormon Transhumanist Association was just a few months old. He and his fellow board members extended a hand of aspiring friendship that helped to establish the legitimacy of Mormon Transhumanism within the broader movement. I knew Mike first as a voice for Buddhist Transhumanism. The basic idea was that human enhancement, including radical life extension, isn’t opposed to dharma. Asked how the two fit together, he told an interviewer for Ozy that “the Buddha says coming back over and over again is a pain in the neck.” More time, by his reading, isn’t escape from enlightenment, but rather pursuit of enlightenment with more time to meet the right guru. To keep expenses low, Mike and I shared a hotel room in the Bay Area the night before the 2014 Religion and Transhumanism Conference. While making the arrangements, he told me he had “very positive feelings about the future of the MTA, and the unique role that Mormon Transhumanists can play in the next stages of our species’ evolution.” After the conference, he praised how well our conference volunteers had worked together without being asked, commenting that if he ever assembled a team to colonize another world, “I’m certainly going to invite MTA folks to be in my ‘Away Team.’” I hope we’re continuing to earn Mike’s trust. One of Mike’s deepest convictions, as I understood him, was that religions differ in name but not in their most important function. His Buddhism, my Mormonism, whatever tradition a stranger inherits: all point to what he called “the Great Tradition of human spirituality,” borrowing a phrase from Adi Da Samraj. And he added that they “should indicate to us that something innate in us underpins and transcends the particular modes of expression that appear among the various religions.” I agree. No single ideology or tradition owns truth. And none of us can achieve our superhuman potential alone. Grief is no sin, I must sometimes remind myself. Even grief can lead us onward and upward toward all that is true, good, and beautiful. Mormons call that “salvation and exaltation.” Buddhists might call that “liberation and awakening.” Whatever the name, in function that’s what Mike spent his life pursuing and encouraging. And I’m thankful for the inspiration he continues to provide me. May you thrive again, my friend.
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  • The Vanguardism Trap

    The Vanguardism Trap
    2026/08/22
    A friend recently described to me a “stench of fascism” in rationalist discourse. “Any theory that makes ‘clear thinking’ a scarce, trainable, testable property generates a distinction between those who have it and those who don’t,” he wrote. “And that distinction is convertible into political authority no matter what the theory says about itself.” He’s right about the mechanism. I’ve smelled it too. But there’s probably a more useful name for it. What he and I have smelled, I suggest, may be more usefully characterized as vanguardism. This is an ideology commonly associated with Vladimir Lenin, who led the Bolsheviks that became the Russian Communist Party. His vanguard claimed superior revolutionary consciousness and organizational discipline. In a broader sense, vanguardism advocates a trained elite empowered to override the judgment of the untrained many, usually in the name of stakes that are too high for untrained deliberation. Recognizing vanguardism matters because it guides our attention to focus differently, and probably more effectively. The risk of vanguardism probably isn’t so much that it would lead rationalists to ultranationalism or the particular kinds of violence historically associated with fascism. That seems orthogonal or at least less proximate to an imminent risk. The risk of vanguardism is that it would lead rationalists to advocate large-scale ceding of human agency to supposed clear thinkers who need not answer to anyone beyond themselves. In function, vanguardism is not unique to any one ideology. Plato’s philosopher-kings, Gnostic special knowledge, Calvinist election, and even misused priesthood authority in the Mormon tradition all share the same risk. A claim of privileged access can convert into a claim of governance over those who lack it. Vanguardism among rationalists may be relatively new. But the attendant risk is already being realized. Many advocate centralizing control of artificial intelligence and other transformative technologies in the name of safety. And some, in or adjacent to rationalist circles, have descended into the anti-democratic neoreactionary “Dark Enlightenment.” Some of these vanguardist rationalists, presumably a minority, may imagine superior ethics to be deducible from superior epistemics. Maybe we can dismiss them as marginal. But many other rationalists make the more subtle vanguardist mistake of supposing superior ethics to be correlated with superior epistemics. They reason that because they understand the facts, risks, and consequences most clearly, they should be empowered to adjudicate values for the rest of us. In contrast, pragmatist philosopher John Dewey observed that democracy isn’t primarily about ascertaining facts. It doesn’t compete with expertise. Rather, democracy is primarily about forming and transforming values, and thereby deciding what we should do with facts. No expert can do that without us because, although facts constrain values, values also constrain facts. In fact, values constrain not only discovery but also creation of facts. Values create more values, which are themselves a kind of fact. And values create other kinds of facts as a consequence of action on values. Moreover, the creation of facts is a consequence of plural action on values, creating realities that even the clearest thinkers, greatest experts, and superintelligent Gods cannot create without us. Ethics, actually to be ethics, must be grounded in values. More fundamentally, ethics must be grounded in desire. Facts and rationality are certainly important, even utterly necessary, as we seek to fulfill and reconcile desire. But neither is sufficient without desire. “Desire” that is asserted from the top down is not and cannot coherently be our desire. It would be our enslavement or annihilation. And the self-appointed clear thinkers who would centralize the power of our agency into their own, “for our good,” would be our enslavers or annihilators. Such is the risk of vanguardism. Rationalists must vigorously resist vanguardism. The model of clear thinking that would justify it is epistemically incomplete, lacking that which cannot be coherently centralized. In its stead, we can formulate, embrace, and advocate strong arguments for the hard work of formal decentralization. And we can put those arguments into practical application, restructuring the world such that our common good persists as that which emerges among us, and resists that which asserts itself over us. Decentralization, not vanguardism, is how we ensure a beautiful future for humanity, without coercion that would amount to no future at all.
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