Flat Earth Research Center | FERC - Preparing for the Singularity Transhumanism (Part - 2) @flatearthresearchcenter4544 | Uploaded July 2017 | Updated October 2024, 7 hours ago.
April 7, 1844, Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon faith, delivered a sermon to twenty thousand of his followers in Nauvoo, Illinois. The immediate occasion was the funeral of King Follett, a close friend of Smith’s, and there is no doubt that death was on the prophet’s mind. “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!” Smith told the crowd. “That is the great secret.” He continued: “You have got to learn how to be gods yourselves . . . the same as all gods have done before you, namely, by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one; from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead.” Lorenzo Snow, the fifth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, struck upon a simpler formulation of the same idea, often repeated today among the Mormon faithful: “As God now is, man may be.”
Earlier this month, soon after Mormons from around the world convened in Salt Lake City, Utah, for their general conference, a smaller gathering took place at the public library in Provo. It was the annual meeting of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, a group of people who believe that the development and dissemination of advanced technologies—cryogenics, bionics, artificial intelligence, and so on—will raise humanity to the heights of power and immortality that Smith envisioned. In the past, the meeting has included presentations from visiting scholars such as Richard Bushman, a prominent Mormon historian and Smith archivist, and Aubrey de Grey, the chief science officer of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Research Foundation, whose slogan is “Reimagine Aging.” This year’s edition featured talks with titles like “Zion as Superorganism” and “The Infinite Resurrection,” with a lunch break for deli sandwiches in between.
The M.T.A. has its roots in the early two-thousands, when the Internet had become a thing of dens and dorm rooms. As access to information expanded, the L.D.S. Church began “having trouble controlling its narratives,” Carl Youngblood, a software engineer and one of the M.T.A.’s co-founders, told me. (Youngblood comes from a long line of Mormons, going back to his great-great-grandfather, an artist, who with Brigham Young’s approval went to study Impressionism in Paris and then returned to Salt Lake City to paint temple murals.) As Youngblood spoke with his tech-literate friends and acquaintances, it became clear to him that many were frustrated with what they perceived as the church’s “loyalty to present status quo”; they longed for radical visions of the future. Their forebears “actually thought that they were building the city of God—literally,” Youngblood said. “They were creating plat maps and actually marking off city blocks.” He added, “We thought, Well, why couldn’t we have that sort of zeal?” As Youngblood recalls, one member of the cohort, a young man named Lincoln Cannon, introduced the group to the idea of transhumanism, which he had encountered on various Web sites. That was the beginning of the M.T.A. Over the next decade, the band of fourteen founders grew to six hundred members, with Cannon as their president.
At the simplest level, the promises of transhumanism are pretty much irrefutable, even humdrum. Of course technology will improve on human frailty. That process began centuries ago—look at eyeglasses and peg legs. But in the eighty-nine years since the British biologist Julian Huxley, the founder of the World Wildlife Federation and brother of Aldous, coined the word “transhumanism,” the movement has reached far wilder heights of prognostication. Some transhumanists have suggested that we may eventually become immortal, as medical science outpaces disease. Others speculate that our corporeal beings will one day be made inorganic. These predictions may seem, to the uninitiated, like the absurd stuff of science fiction, but they will surely gain social acceptance as the tech titans of Silicon Valley push transhumanist ideals. If the import of Google’s decision, in 2012, to hire the futurist Ray Kurzweil hasn’t sunk in, pause to consider the fact that the second-largest company in the world (by market capitalization) has a director of engineering who believes that humanity will conquer death.
Transhumanism Is Your Enemy!
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM5xKc15AH9ChBES4flNPbg36sypHQ0Co
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April 7, 1844, Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon faith, delivered a sermon to twenty thousand of his followers in Nauvoo, Illinois. The immediate occasion was the funeral of King Follett, a close friend of Smith’s, and there is no doubt that death was on the prophet’s mind. “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens!” Smith told the crowd. “That is the great secret.” He continued: “You have got to learn how to be gods yourselves . . . the same as all gods have done before you, namely, by going from one small degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one; from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you attain to the resurrection of the dead.” Lorenzo Snow, the fifth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, struck upon a simpler formulation of the same idea, often repeated today among the Mormon faithful: “As God now is, man may be.”
Earlier this month, soon after Mormons from around the world convened in Salt Lake City, Utah, for their general conference, a smaller gathering took place at the public library in Provo. It was the annual meeting of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, a group of people who believe that the development and dissemination of advanced technologies—cryogenics, bionics, artificial intelligence, and so on—will raise humanity to the heights of power and immortality that Smith envisioned. In the past, the meeting has included presentations from visiting scholars such as Richard Bushman, a prominent Mormon historian and Smith archivist, and Aubrey de Grey, the chief science officer of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Research Foundation, whose slogan is “Reimagine Aging.” This year’s edition featured talks with titles like “Zion as Superorganism” and “The Infinite Resurrection,” with a lunch break for deli sandwiches in between.
The M.T.A. has its roots in the early two-thousands, when the Internet had become a thing of dens and dorm rooms. As access to information expanded, the L.D.S. Church began “having trouble controlling its narratives,” Carl Youngblood, a software engineer and one of the M.T.A.’s co-founders, told me. (Youngblood comes from a long line of Mormons, going back to his great-great-grandfather, an artist, who with Brigham Young’s approval went to study Impressionism in Paris and then returned to Salt Lake City to paint temple murals.) As Youngblood spoke with his tech-literate friends and acquaintances, it became clear to him that many were frustrated with what they perceived as the church’s “loyalty to present status quo”; they longed for radical visions of the future. Their forebears “actually thought that they were building the city of God—literally,” Youngblood said. “They were creating plat maps and actually marking off city blocks.” He added, “We thought, Well, why couldn’t we have that sort of zeal?” As Youngblood recalls, one member of the cohort, a young man named Lincoln Cannon, introduced the group to the idea of transhumanism, which he had encountered on various Web sites. That was the beginning of the M.T.A. Over the next decade, the band of fourteen founders grew to six hundred members, with Cannon as their president.
At the simplest level, the promises of transhumanism are pretty much irrefutable, even humdrum. Of course technology will improve on human frailty. That process began centuries ago—look at eyeglasses and peg legs. But in the eighty-nine years since the British biologist Julian Huxley, the founder of the World Wildlife Federation and brother of Aldous, coined the word “transhumanism,” the movement has reached far wilder heights of prognostication. Some transhumanists have suggested that we may eventually become immortal, as medical science outpaces disease. Others speculate that our corporeal beings will one day be made inorganic. These predictions may seem, to the uninitiated, like the absurd stuff of science fiction, but they will surely gain social acceptance as the tech titans of Silicon Valley push transhumanist ideals. If the import of Google’s decision, in 2012, to hire the futurist Ray Kurzweil hasn’t sunk in, pause to consider the fact that the second-largest company in the world (by market capitalization) has a director of engineering who believes that humanity will conquer death.
Transhumanism Is Your Enemy!
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLM5xKc15AH9ChBES4flNPbg36sypHQ0Co
Back up Channels -
youtube.com/channel/UCtSovn7foKC917f4_4cxB4Q
youtube.com/channel/UCmWHolE-GWmph-xeGMkaokw
Facebook -
facebook.com/FERC303
Twitter -
twitter.com/FERC66629558
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linkedin.com/in/flat-earth-research-center-397381134
