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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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  • The Veil Is Individuation

    The Veil Is Individuation
    2026/07/23
    One relatively unique aspect of Mormon theology is the concept of the veil. We typically understand the veil to be something like a curtain drawn over our premortal memory. It separates us from clear awareness of God, so that mortal life can serve as a genuine test. And we commonly imagine it descending upon us, either suddenly or gradually, around the time of our mortal birth. We associate the veil with forgetting. We forget our premortal selves, our premortal relations, and the premortal world generally. And some suppose that the forgetting is the veil itself. But I think we can profit from recognizing the forgetting to be a consequence of the veil rather than the veil itself. The veil itself, I propose, is separation. You’re a distinct center of experience, while I’m another. Each of us is unable to reach directly into the other’s mind. And the forgetting is just one consequence of this separation. More precisely, the forgetting is just one consequence of a particular kind of separation: our differentiation within and beyond the mind of God. In one sense, we were with God in the beginning as eternal matter in spiritual patterns of potential. In another sense, God created us spiritually: conceiving, calculating, and differentiating us from God within God, as our thoughts differentiate from ourselves within ourselves. Then God created us physically: evolving, cultivating, and differentiating us from God beyond God, as our actions differentiate from ourselves beyond ourselves. In terms of its function, the veil is individuation. It’s the process by which God differentiates into more Gods. It’s like human parents procreating a fertilized cell that differentiates into a body of specialized cells that become an embryo. In a sense, the embryo forgets the parents from which it differentiated. But of course, it also maintains some important connections, such as genetic inheritance and spatial proximity to the mother in her womb. Individuation isn’t necessarily a loss. To the contrary, individuation may be the ultimate creative act. Rather than diminishing the original, differentiation initiates a process by which the original may transcend itself with help beyond itself. Separation isn’t necessarily a loss. Agency, relationship, and love all require a genuine other with whom to interact. Undifferentiated unity has no one to address and no one to answer, carries no message, and enacts no love. So the veil, rather than an obstacle to communion with God, is actually a precondition to that communion in the fullest sense. Without the gap between us, there is no us. There are two ways past the veil. And they’re not symmetric. On the one hand, you can part the veil by ceasing to be individuated, which is spiritual death – maybe something like a dissolution into native element as Brigham Young envisioned. On the other hand, we can part the veil by re-integrating with God and each other in complex consensual ways, which is eternal life in a decentralized Godhood that preserves the identities that it joins. Most importantly, parting the veil isn’t just some anti-natural magical event that we must passively await. To the contrary, it’s moral work that we can do now. Each act of compassion reaches across the gap between us without diminishing either side. And that’s exactly what covenant (coming together) and atonement (being one) have always meant. As our technical capacities continue to advance, we will develop new ways of communicating. Presently, we connect our decentralized minds principally through sight and sound and their various mediums. But the time may come, perhaps not long from now, when we connect our minds more directly. This will present new opportunities and new risks, including the risk of dissolution into smothering consolidations of power, and the opportunity of transcendence into unprecedented degrees of networked empathy. The veil wasn’t simply the forgetting. It was our individuation. And it isn’t merely an obstacle. It’s the structured space across which we are learning to become many in one.
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  • Finding Ourselves Making

    Finding Ourselves Making
    2026/07/29
    We often speak of identity as if it were atomic, in the strict sense of the word: a fixed kernel you either have or don’t. We imagine a self that persists whole or perishes entire, with nothing between. But identity isn’t atomic. Identity is organized. It admits of more and less. It can be distinguished or obscured, aggregated or dispersed, robust or fragile, complex or simple, and empowered or impotent. And it changes. Identity and existence are different concepts, even while overlapping. Something might exist in the most basic sense without having identity, to itself or others. From a materialist perspective, existence entails matter, or at least energy or information. Although, if something like a weak panpsychism holds, existence would also entail that which Mormon theology might associate with “spirit matter” or unorganized intelligence, something like matter experiencing itself from the inside in some dim alien way that “experience” risks overstating, even while preserving a practical moral stance for outside observers. Mind, too, is distinct from identity, though they overlap. Again from a materialist perspective, mind is (or emerges from or within) matter organized in such a way that it experiences itself as a self, implying at least some basic internal identity, or as that which Mormon theology might associate with “spirit body” or organized intelligence. Mindless matter also exists, even if retaining a weak panpsychist aspect. And of course mindless matter can still have identity projected onto it, and intentionally attributed to it, by minds. A mind can be disorganized to some extent without ceasing to exist. More generally, identity can be disorganized to some extent without ceasing to exist. And even at greater degrees of disorganization, even as identity ceases to be recognizable as such to any associated minds, at least the components of identity persist as matter or energy or information. In an 1859 sermon, Brigham Young may have given these ideas their strongest theological expression. Eternal life, he taught, gives “mankind power to preserve their identity” ( Journal of Discourses 6:333). Elsewhere in the same discourse, he characterized “the law of Christ” as “the power to keep matter in its organization.” A year earlier, Brigham stated the opposite just as plainly, saying some “will be decomposed, both soul and body, and return to their native element” ( Journal of Discourses 7:57). He continued, “I do not say that they will be annihilated; but they will be disorganized.” Notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say matter stops existing. Rather, as Joseph Smith put it in his last general conference sermon, “the pure principles of element … may be organized and re-organized; but not destroyed.” Minds, spirit bodies, or organizations of intelligence can disorganize, perhaps indefinitely, while that of which they’re composed remains at least potentially intelligible, observable even if not observed by others, perhaps even experiencing itself (even if not as a self) faintly from the inside. The change associated with disorganization isn’t absolute termination of existence in the broadest sense. The change is in a quality of existence. Identity is a quality of existence. None of us owns our identity alone. As Brigham put it, “we have no character, only such as our friends and enemies give us” ( Journal of Discourses 7:57). And although that’s “only a shadow,” he insisted, “I want to preserve my identity, so that you can see Brigham in the eternal worlds just as you see him now.” Attribution detached from organization is the shadow, but attribution connected to persisting organization becomes recognition. Identities are personal psychological constructs and shared social constructs, interacting and ideally reconciling, in context of the world in which we and our community find ourselves. That isn’t a limitation on identity. Rather, that’s the mechanism of identity. Identity is reputation aggregated across observers through time, associated with a consistent identifier, without which there’s nothing to aggregate to. More observation, more consistently gathered, makes a more robust reputation. And a more robust reputation is a more robust identity. We might always aspire to a more robust identity, across more observation through time and space. And some would call that a more “true” identity or the “true self.” I can consent to the aspiration. But I distrust superlatives, including “most robust,” or “true self” understood as a negation of the self that we actually experience. The identities we have now are at least as true, because they exist at least as much, as any supposed “most robust” identity. And the identities we have now are generally more “true,” because our suppositions about actualities beyond direct experience are so often wrong. The self you’re experiencing now is the one doing the ...
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  • How to Know God

    How to Know God
    2026/06/07
    The scriptures say a lot about God. God is the greatest intelligence (Abraham 3:19). God has a tangible body (D&C 130:22). God works within a community of Gods (Abraham 4:1). And God is present in and through the world itself (D&C 88:6). God is courageous (Moses 7:28). God is compassionate (1 John 4:16). And God is creative (Moses 1:33). Crucially, God is not (or at least particular Gods are not) static. In other words, in at least some important ways, God changes. Of that, Jesus Christ is the principal example. “He received not of the fulness at first, but continued from grace to grace, until he received a fulness” (D&C 93:13). At least, that’s what scripture says. But can we know any of that for ourselves? Can you know God? And, if so, how can you know God? When such questions arise, Mormons often appeal to Moroni 10:4-5. “And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things.” What does that mean? Of course there’s the face value meaning: you can know anything “by the power of the Holy Ghost” after sincerely, intently, and faithfully asking God. But what does it actually look like, in practice, to ask in that way? And what is an answer “by the power of the Holy Ghost”? Often, Mormons interpret this to mean that we can know something is true by praying and feeling good about it. I think that can be a good start. But it’s a bad stop. Good feelings can sometimes be misleading. Even more broadly, when you close your eyes and set aside appeals to authority, what do you know? Honestly, what do you actually know? I suggest you know, at least, that which you’re feeling and thinking now. Regardless of the extent to which these immanent experiences may actually reflect anything that transcends you, you know the immanent experiences. Regardless of the extent to which your interior world accurately maps onto any exterior world, you know the interior world. If you’re feeling good, you know that. Suffering you know equally well. Your hopes and dreams, however fleeting they may be, you know as perfectly as they can be known. Your doubts too are known to you, even if ironically, as fully as knowledge can attain. That, I contend, says something about how we ought to interpret the Moroni passage. And, in turn, it says something about how we can ultimately know God most dependably. After explaining that God changes, as exemplified by Jesus Christ, the scripture continues (D&C 93:19-20): “I give unto you these sayings that you may understand and know how to worship, and know what you worship, that you may come unto the Father in my name, and in due time receive of his fulness. For if you keep my commandments you shall receive of his fulness, and be glorified in me as I am in the Father; therefore, I say unto you, you shall receive grace for grace.” That “fulness” that we may receive is the same that Jesus received. It is glorification in Christ, who is glorified in God. By extension, it’s a fullness of Godhood. And that, the scripture says, is what and how we ought to worship – the worship of emulation, rather than anything like obsequious groveling. The scriptures say a lot more about the practical consequences of such worship, of emulating and becoming God. God organizes us to gain intelligence and bodies, in community, expanding our presence in and through the world (Abraham 3:22-26). We increase in capacity for courage and compassion until, as God is, “so are we in this world” (1 John 4:17-18). Then we are Gods (D&C 76:58-60), made “equal in power, and in might, and in dominion” with God (D&C 76:95) by whom, through whom, and in whom “the worlds are and were created” (D&C 76:23-24). We will “see as [we] are seen, and know as [we] are known” (D&C 76:94). We will “comprehend even God, being quickened in him and by him” (D&C 88:45-50). And “when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (Moroni 7:48). Consider. How could it be otherwise? How could God not know God? How could we not know ourselves, at least as dependably as we know anything at all? And if we recognize in our own experience, in our own feelings and thoughts, that which we esteem as Godhood, how could we not know God? To recognize God in ourselves, we must know God. This is simply true by definition. The first principle of the gospel of Jesus Christ is faith. I understand that faith, in its most basic form, to be an active working trust in, or the courage to act on, Jesus’ claim that we, together with him, can overcome suffering and death. Joseph Smith, in his last general conference sermon, pressed us to understand that first principle, ...
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