 Our next speaker will be Evan Hadfield. Evan is a student at the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in computer science and economics. Evan recently founded the campus organization Texas Transhumanists and has been active in the Austin startup scene, participating in events at South by Southwest, three-day startup, and Code for America. Evan has also attended several Mormon history conferences and considers himself a dedicated Mormon history hobbyist. Please welcome Evan. Hi. So I'd like to basically lay the claim that I'm going to make a definition for God. And actually, I'll overlap with some of Kathy's statements earlier, so that will save me some time, because I don't have to delve into what I mean by the universal God I'll delve into. But what I'd like to describe is a similarity that Mormonism shares with Buddhism and why specifically that similarity is important and what insights we can draw from that. So first, of course, why Buddhism has advocates, as I assume most of you are, for technological progress. It is worthwhile to consider Buddhism as the most strikingly influential form of religious practice in the technology space. First things come to mind, of course, Steve Jobs, retreats and now famous practices of Buddhism. There's hallmarks of Zen Buddhism and making design simple. And of course, meditation is very popular in this sort of rising creative class that we associate with the technology field. And of course, just conjuring images of the West Coast, liberal, whole foods, electronic car drivers, also these Buddhist meditators and yoga practitioners. But Mormonism does not conjure up those same sort of images. And I think that's the issue that I think needs to be addressed. Buddhism today is enjoying an unprecedented renaissance with a revival in largely atheist China, but also importantly, has actually the fastest growing religion in the West, major world religion. The major Pew study of religion in the US conducted a few years back found that Buddhism was actually primarily made up of American-born adherents, whites, and converts in sharp contrast to other non-Western religions which were mainly made up of immigrants. Only one third of American Buddhists are actually Asian and three out of four Buddhists in America are converts, the highest of any single religious group. Meanwhile, less than one out of four Mormons in the US are converts. Mainstream Christianity in the West and Mormonism in particular are experiencing major demographic decline in a key demographic, mine. Males in their mid-to-late 20s are leaving the church faster than ever. And by many measures, the rate of active participation in the church in the US is actually in decline. Some of those that leave will seek other avenues for spirituality. And Buddhism is successfully thriving as a part of that sort of spiritual conquest. Not only are most American Buddhists converts, but half were raised Christian. And I think this is the most interesting part. Only Buddhists reported a higher life satisfaction rate than Mormons. Now, I'm not going to try to argue for any specific tenets of the Buddhist faith or that there are any more valuable tenets of that religion over any others. And I'm not even going to try to argue for a specific track of Buddhism. And any formal student of Buddhism is probably going to cringe at my crude summation of Buddhist teachings and my lumping various sects together. But for the purposes of what I'm trying to argue, I find it proper to lay out just a few of Buddhism's key tenets. Buddhism's most important teachings are summed up in the Four Noble Truths. Essentially, it's that life is filled with suffering, which is caused by our mortal cravings. And that these cravings can be extinguished by following a concept of rightness, essentially a moral code. Zen Buddhism, the most popular variant of Buddhism in the West, is atheistic. It actually rejects all superstitious dogma. It rejects karma, reincarnation, and even nirvana. But it does demand meditation, concentration, and physical discipline as a means to achieve enlightenment. A state of mind where the individual comes to realize him or herself, or what other gender, as part of a universal oneness. The word to describe this connectivity is satori, the idea that all living things share equally in the eternal. It is intentionally left vague, subjective, and mystical. Buddhism generally teaches that by coming to this union with the world's soul, man's ego disappears, and therefore the problems of ego and thus suffering disappears. This is the fundamental idea I want to build upon now. The Mormon God has a physical, more advanced being, is quite congruent with transhumanism's belief in the eventual immortality and a power of post-humans. This creator God is, however, a very Abrahamic concept of divinity. It describes a physical being in an advanced state who is the ultimate initial cause of our existence. In Buddhism, as with other Eastern religions, there is no concept of a first cause or creator. Thus, the insight I want to pull from Buddhism to today is an entirely separate, although not entirely new, as clearly Kathy has pointed out, definition for God. The oneness of all present, past, and future experiences. This God is the collective manifestation of the universe experiencing itself. It is this collective experience, the most incredible, beautiful, and misunderstood process in the known universe. Joseph Smith's cosmology gives the most earnest and sincere glimpse into what I feel is a fundamentally Mormon interpretation of this universal God, at least before Brigham Young got ahold of it and, as with most things, Brigham Young did, kind of ruined it. In 1833, near the beginning of his ministry, Smith declared, as Kathy pointed out, that glory of God is intelligence, or in other words, light and truth. I will take that as meaning light for its immaterial and yet morally illuminating quality and truth for its eternal essence and key part of the universe. He is essentially describing information. And I'm using that in a quantum physics term of the word, the most fundamental, simplest element of the universe. Interestingly, there's a similar concept in Buddhism. That of the Dharmakaya. The Dalai Lama describes it as a space of emptiness, inherent clear light, the essential nature of the mind. It is out of this Dharmakaya that all things are created and existed in their earliest form. It is the most reduced essence of everything. Again, information. And it sounds equivalent to the concept of Mormon intelligence. With these dual perspectives, we gain insight into how this definition of God takes form. God himself, finding he was in the midst of spirits and glory because he was more intelligent, saw proper to institute laws whereby the rest could have a privilege to advance unto himself. Taken from Joseph Smith's now popular, or well-known King Follett sermon. Viewing God as our collective experience or consciousness, I think casts a transhumanist light on Joseph Smith's description of the process of godly evolution. God, like the human body, naturally developed from its most primordial state a means by which to bring the smallest unit of which it is made a cell into a higher form resembling the whole. In the body is the process of reproduction that enables this sort of cell dividing and replicating itself into a very complex, functional, conscious human being. In God and the God I'm describing, it is the process of refinement through technology, knowledge, and creating meaning through experience that brings us as individuals into a higher state like unto itself. The full realization of a post-humanist future where intelligent beings are super conscious and infinitely intelligent. So essentially to wrap up, I'm not arguing that this is a new definition or we need to redefine God and that because it doesn't conflict with, I think, the Abrahamic context or the new God argument. But what I do think it does is defines God in a way that is congruous with the sort of awe and devotion that we attribute traditional concepts of God. The God where we are all a part of it, where we all share in the experience and derive our morals from our shared conscious and collective brings us empathy and the value of diversifying our technologies and education and knowledge. That is something worthy of devotion, worthy of a moral code to follow and praise and praise and song the scientific God, the God of docents, the God of Mormonism, the creator God through natural scientific themes still uses pretty cruel evolution and death and suffering to achieve this means. And while it can be viewed in a valuable light, I will argue that through Buddhism and through kind of seeing where Joseph Smith and Buddhism intersect, we derive a more powerful and more spiritual and lasting meaning of God. Thank you. Yes. Oh, is there any exception to suffering or avoiding the suffering by not being attached to the world around this? How do you reconcile that with the technical and political demands of Buddhism? So the question is, Buddhism is associated with the feeling of like detachment from material possessions and suffering and like reducing your lifestyle. And that seems in congruous with normal transhumanist ideals. I think that what we are seeing with Buddhism and why it is increasingly popular is for its sense of simplicity and that the technology sphere where we have all these gadgets and wires and everything is very complex and we just want to buy all these gadgets, I think is really just a temporary state. And we'll look back on as, wow, that was kind of a crazy couple of decades where we had a bunch of stuff. But what we're seeing now is a glimpse of technology is ubiquitous. It's seamless with the natural world. And we don't really recognize it as separate. And I think that's where Buddhism is going to continue to research. Well, I was hearing this, that the God of Mormonism, to you seem rather kind of as one who operates within the universal or even natural law seemed like one that, if you think of it that way, is less awe-inspiring. But I think that the traditional view of the Mormon God is quite awe-inspiring. It's only when you try to think of God in a scientific way that sometimes you run the risk of losing the awe. And so is that what you're trying to do? Are you trying to? You've already come to the conclusion that the scientific view of God is compelling, but you're trying to bring back the awe. Is that what you're doing? Yes, so the question is, am I saying with the scientific view of God, it's loss of its awe and trying to reestablish that traditional awe, essentially? Yes. I essentially do think that we can make a good case for Abrahamic God that there's a being in an advanced state. But by doing so, we lose a lot of that power and oomph and motivation for doing good things. I think if we take a sort of Buddhist approach to it, and really what I think Dott Smith was getting at, I think it restores some of that power. One more? Sure. A question coming in terms of you referred to the Mormon God as being in similarity to other Abrahamic gods, the first cause. And I wonder if you recognize that in terms of the quote he gave that goes to Smith of God, fighting himself amongst doesn't imply not a first cause, Dott. So rather, a god that did exist in the existence of eternal city. And it doesn't became God. It doesn't change some of your armies in terms of the Mormon understanding of God as the separate first cause who did all of this stuff rather than this God who organized and gave the ability for almost all of what he made talk about in terms of the universe to become what it is to become. OK, so your question is, if the real Mormon concept of God is like a God who exists in a already-existent sphere and doesn't actually create or for initially, OK, does that lose some of the meaning? I know we're pressed on time, so I'll answer that pretty quickly. I think the answer is that what I'm describing, essentially, I think that the Mormon concept of God is no different because it doesn't really solve where our meaning comes from. It's just a step in the process. Well, that God came from another God who came from another God. And it's just like this endless chain of being. And it's still very scientific, like creating and initiating. But why? And I think the why derives from the sort of Buddhist perspective. Thank you.