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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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  • Without Beginning

    Without Beginning
    2026/08/08
    Dorothée and I usually watch a show together before bed. Presently, we’re watching a science fiction show with a narrative that revolves around time travel. It’s entertaining, especially the recreations of historical events that bump into modern sensibilities. But it’s also incoherent in many ways. My work sometimes invites questions about time travel, for at least a couple reasons. First, although neither intended nor necessary, time travel could explain recursion in the Creation Argument of the New God Argument. When people read the idea that superhumanity creates superhumanity, they sometimes imagine the future of our human civilization creating our past and present in a simple time loop. But only procedural recursion, not temporal recursion, is required by the argument. And adding notions of temporal recursion tends to create more problems than it solves, in my estimation. Second, something like a subtle version of time travel could explain my observation that Mormon theology entails neither a finite nor an infinite regress of Gods. As the Kolob hymn puts it, “Do you think that you could ever, through all eternity, find out the generation where Gods began to be?” Such questions imply at least a third possibility: an indefinite regress. Maybe our present can create not only our future but also our past to some extent. Quantum physics may allow for an alternative to the commonsense notion that reality is determined exclusively from past to future. For example, consider observer effects in delayed-choice experiments. You send a photon along a path that requires either a wave or a particle state. But the state along the path is indefinite until you look at the photon afterwards, at which time the past state becomes definite. Did you change the past? You didn’t change the past of the photon from one definite state to another. But apparently you did change the past state of the photon from indefinite to definite. So if you didn’t change the past then you created the past, to whatever extent the past exists. That’s an unusual way to think about the past. But it’s quite like the ordinary way of thinking about the future. We aren’t changing the future from one definite state to another. We’re changing an indefinite future into a definite present. Outside of strange experiments, the past seems much more definite than the future. But what if the distant past is as indefinite as the near future? What if the distant past exists no more nor less than the near future? Perhaps the historians’ project, at cosmological scale, is persistently changing an indefinite past into the definite present? Imagine that we are, here and now, near the forward-moving edge of relatively high spacetime definiteness. The proximate past is highly defined by memories, records, environment, and other present constraints. But both the future and the distant past are increasingly indefinite to the extent that present constraints are sparse or absent. Reality, as we experience it, would be a region of relative definiteness surrounded temporally, and perhaps spatially, by horizons of increasing indefiniteness. It’s not controversial to claim that we know less about the distant past than the recent past. But I’m suggesting more. Experiments suggest that some aspects of the past are not merely unknown but genuinely indefinite, such that they exist only to the extent that we create them. And perhaps these indefinite aspects of the past increasingly accumulate until the distant past becomes as indefinite as the future. Again, this wouldn’t mean that we could change definite historical events. Dense networks of mutually reinforcing correlations would still ensure that the proximate past remains as stable as commonsense supposes it to be. But beyond the horizons of the densely definite, toward not only the future but also the past, reality may be knowable only to the extent that we create it. Let’s return to Mormon theology. There might be neither a first generation of Gods nor an infinite regress. The Gods themselves might not know. And that might not be ignorance as much as it is an honest account of limits on knowledge as imposed by reality – the limits of that which is actually knowable. Without beginning, the Gods find themselves making worlds without end. Looking toward the future, although constrained by the present, they see indefinite possibilities of creation. Looking toward the near past, more heavily constrained by the present, they see definite possibilities of discovery. Looking farther still, they find themselves making worlds without beginning.
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