 I would like to pretend that I'm reading from my laptop because I'm so environmentally conscious and I'm good, but actually it's because I never finished in time to actually print out a presentation ever. About a million years ago when I was in graduate school, one of my colleagues came in one day and she said, what happened last night? Some missionaries from your church knocked on my door and they started talking about how you could be with your family forever. Like that was a good thing. A novice to transhumanist thinking and writing can have a little bit the same response. They're talking about human beings becoming smarter and living longer, as if that was a good thing. Most of us are lucky enough to have experiences that help us imagine why one might want to live with one's family forever, although some of us will also know why one might not want to. I want to think carefully today about why we might want to be smarter or live longer and about how that why should matter. Since I know far less than all of you about transhumanism, I want to start about talking some things I might know more about than some of you. German literature and music and depression. Go ahead and make all the jokes you want about the potential causal links between those two or three. First, let's see, Baroque music. I'm going to go backwards. One of the features of Baroque music, the one that we usually think of as defining the genre, is ornamentation. Singers and instrumentalists were licensed and encouraged to augment what was written in the score with trills and mordents and appoggiaturas and doubled cadences and accents and all kinds of other things that you see notated there. But all of this happened above the basso continuo or figured base, which was a very strict system by which actually this picture is too blurry for you to see it, but above the bottom score that you can see numbers and those quite strictly defined the chord progression that has to come out and how the baseline should progress through a piece. The history of this form of accompaniment is what I want to think about today. It's almost certain that this strict and independent baseline arose as a means of coordinating polychoral works, that is, works that were composed for two or more choirs, usually for especially festive occasions, or sometimes to highlight architectural features of churches. They'd place choirs in all the niftiest spots in the building and then they'd all sing together and people would look around at the building. But in order to keep that together, they'd have instrumentalists in the center that at first were just doubling the choral parts and those parts would be all written out precisely for the instrumentalists, the way that they were for the singers, and they kept the the celebration from flying apart. Eventually the bass would continue which supported and augmented the other vocal or instrumental parts instead of merely doubling them, developed and this form of just notating briefly the form of the chord with a number, allowed a sort of freedom within the form that that eventually made it possible for the the bass to not just keep keep things together, but to provide enough of an underlying texture that you could have a solo instrument or a solo singer doing all kinds of interesting melodic things, but with enough from the from the bass to make it sound rich. I think if this works we might even be able to hear some of it. Let's see. No. Okay well we don't have to, you guys have all heard the Bach Easter oratorio right? Anybody want to sing it? Okay don't worry you have to sing later later on in this presentation so there it is. Oh okay well never mind. I'm a humanist. I don't do this stuff. That's all right we'll we'll get back. You can imagine you've heard enough Bach to know you know the singers doing their trills and the and the bass going neatly. So ultimately the possibilities opened by having this independent and predictable bass line led to monotic forms of music that could support a soloist. That leads to cantatas that incorporate soloists as well as new chorale forms and eventually to opera and sort of everything that comes after that. Those forms eventually become too rich and complicated for figured bass to fully realize and so the more complex orchestrations of the classical and subsequent musical styles require once again a fully notated part for the bass instruments along with the rest of the orchestra and chorus. So there's this wonderful progress of musical innovation and celebration outstripping the extant forms developing new forms and then again overflowing those new forms and reaching back for the old forms newly understood which give expression to new ideas. We could if we were being sweeping in grandiose and oversimplifying a lot trace a similar progression in literature. The German Baroque literature becomes obsessed both with form and with breaking that form at the same time. This is a passage from the opening of one chapter of Martin Opitz's book Das Buch der deutschen Poetry which was sort of the first attempt at codifying a German literary theory. He starts off by saying this well with this statement he says although I've taken upon myself at the request of other noble minded people to say something about German poetics and through that to better propagate our language yet I am not of the opinion that somebody may be turned into a poet by means of rules and regulations. So he is at least humble about his project but his project is essentially he says that he's going to describe the purpose of poetry and its historical and cultural context. He's going to give a typology of poetry giving the genres and their most appropriate applications. He's going to define poetic style. He's going to iterate rhyme and meter with examples of the sonnet and ode and verse forms and he prescribes the use of Alexandrines as opposed to the low form of Knüttelweiß which is this older German rhyming verse of four ambic feet. He thinks there should be strict adherence to meter measured by the natural stress in the word. The use of pure rhyme only and the absolute exclusion of foreign words. So despite his belief that you can't make a poet out of rules and regulations he does his best to make enough rules that one could become a poet. He achieves all those aims in a book that's about 20 pages long which German literature students really appreciate since later people take lots more pages to do that. At the same time or just a few years after Opus's book was published came this novel called say that three times fast. And this is the first depending on who you ask it's the first Bildungsroman or it's a sort of proto Bildungsroman the form that becomes that. And it takes as the major plot device the development of a single character which is a new thing. So this guy, this Abenteuerliche means adventuresome, this adventuresome odd, odd gesture sort of going through life and it makes comments on politics and social convention and all kinds of things but all through the lens of this sort of innocent guy bumbling through the world and becoming less naive and more sophisticated. This idea even though it's loose and kind of when you read this book it just seems like it's episodic. It's just a bunch of stories even sort of fanciful tales but this seeing a series of things through the eyes of one character is new-ish at least in German literature at that point and it becomes you know of course as we know the the form for most novels right character driven describes many novels and it's even the forerunner of what we have in the sort of declining form of the novel as the memoir right so we can thank or blame Simplitismus for that. But there form is exploded. There's no there's there's nothing that rhymes there's no structure to the story none of the conventions of books up until that time are observed and it's it's very exciting it sort of catches German writers and and all of the 18th and 19th century everybody reads this everybody refers to it it's a sort of seminal moment in in German literature and recognized as a moment where despite the interest and obsession with with form and with German language and privileging the vernacular everything opens up everything is open at that moment and so and and that leads to sort of everything that comes after in much the same way that the figured base both explodes the form and then reforms and and leads to to big things afterwards the next sort of moment in German literature that people know about is Strömendran which is the precursor of Romanticism and it's it's good to taking this form of Simplitismus to its its logical extreme and and creating this character who is all feeling and no rationality and no forethought and no social convention and this guy named Werther wears clothes that are wildly unconventional he wears yellow pants which is for some reason just wildly what's the word just it's it's wildly provocative for Germans these yellow pants and his blue blazer and he is desperately in love and kills himself because he just can't stand the overflowing of his feelings and and this leads believe it or not to a rash of suicides of young German men in yellow pants it's it's actually becomes a real problem so this this overflowing of feeling it's a thing and this this is the precursor the the introduction the beginning of Romanticism which at one point Friedrich Schlegel who's considered sort of the founder of the father of German Romanticism is asked by a friend to to send him a definition of Romanticism and he says I can't it's 125 pages long and that I guess wouldn't fit in the mail back in the day but a few years later he did manage to write this succinct definition of what Romantic poetry was trying to be succinct ish um so this is for those of you who read German because it's really fun and great but here's a sort of loose translation Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry her task is not only to reunify all of the sundered forms of poetry and to bring poetry into communion with philosophy and rhetoric it will and should also blend even meld poetry and prose appreciation and criticism art poetry and nature poetry to make living poetry living and social and to make life and society poetic it should poetize humor and fill and satisfy the forms of art with all the stuff of life itself it should contain everything in a system of art down to the sigh the kiss that the child author breathes out in her artless song other forms of writing are finished and can now only be completely dismembered but the Romantic form is still becoming its mode of being is that it is eternally becoming can never be complete it cannot be exhausted by any theory so there's this sense that everything that has come before is spent is inadequate to the overflowing feeling in the life force of these new funda kindre and yet despite rebelling against formalist classicism the romantics ended up needing form too they turned to folk music and folk tales and fairy tales which they saw as somehow less artificial than other kinds of art but what's interesting here is the sense apparently present in almost every new artistic moment that tries to define itself that life and life feeling have somehow um sorry just skipped a page four six um have have somehow overflowed the conventional forms that the new generation's sorrows and joys and loves or appreciation of beauty have somehow escaped the bounds of the expressive forms that everyone else knew before them this moment of excess and abundance that I want us to notice um this discussion of excessive feeling in German literature leads us of course to the topic of depression um Andrew Solomon the great writer who wrote the noonday demon which is the most beautiful and optimistic book you will ever read about depression um says that depression is the flaw in love to be creatures who love we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose life is fraught with sorrows we are each of us held in the solitude of an autonomous body time passes what has been will never be again pain is the first experience of world helplessness I know he must have studied German at some point nobody else would put world helplessness together as a compound word um and it never leaves us perhaps depression can be best described as emotional pain that forces itself upon us against our will and then breaks free of its externals grief is depression in proportion to circumstance depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance I'm interested um here in this notion of feeling um in this case pain that escapes its externals and um becomes disproportionate um Solomon doesn't really um doesn't explain um where it is he derives this sense of what the what the proportion to circumstance would be what what does it mean to have grief in proportion or out of proportion to circumstance why do we have this sense that that feeling should somehow correspond on some scale um to our experience I mean we we do I think we walk around with this sense and a lot of the time when we're unhappy it's because we think we're not feeling the right way for what's going on around us but but where where do we have that that notion of coincidence um but but there is here in Solomon's um comparison of grief and depression this assumption that there's a proper proportion of circumstance and feeling and that we get into trouble when there's an excess of feeling when grief slips out of the cultural occasions and rituals we have created to contain it um but what what makes us afraid um then or fearful or in pain is not um not the fear of death he talks about how you know if we are going to love then we are going to be afraid of death because death will take away the the things that we love um but it's not really death that that is the problem here but the the surface the surface of love this excess of feeling whose expression we cannot contain um in Goethe's Faust to return for a second to German um to stuff I know um the the the uh the thing that is going to make him become human again to lose his bet with the devil that makes him omnipotent is if he if he experiences a moment that he enjoys so much that he loves so much that he asks for the moment to stay for a while though you are so beautiful and and if he says that to a moment of human expression of human love then he will lose his exalted status that he's gained by bargaining with the devil so there's there's this sense that that capturing that moment that of intense feeling is the thing that that makes us most human um but we all labor under this idea that somehow there's a correct proportion of life and feeling and that if we could just keep things in equilibrium and and not be overcome by um that excess of feeling we we everything would be fine um then again maybe it's not all of us who who want that equilibrium um writers especially poets and musicians are all about this excess of feeling it's their stock in trade and um one of the most common responses to the excess of feeling is either to try to invent a new form or explode an old one to make room for this abundance of sentiment that they always think is the new discovery of their generation um of course it's not right jesus even in the you know a couple of millennia ago talks about the idea that that new wine and old bottles don't go together um but there's what's constant is this felt need to capture the part of humanity of humaneness that's always overflowing um human art is always after this excessive meaning and capturing it in a way that can be communicated most of the time words are inadequate are as inadequate as sonata form for this kind of communication so we reach for metaphor and even for synesthesia the sort of conflation of of various sentences um billy collins lampoons this tendency in his delightful poem litany um which you probably all know but i'm going to read because comic relief is necessary uh in disquisitions about german literature um his poem is called uh litany and it starts off with a quotation from somebody named jean cliquillon who who says you are the bread and the knife the crystal goblet and the wine and then collins says you are the bread and the knife the crystal goblet and the wine you are the dew on the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun you are the white apron of the baker and the marsh birds suddenly in flight however you are not the wind in the orchard the plums on the counter or the house of cards and you are certainly not the pine scented air there is just no way that you are the pine scented air it's possible that you are the fish under the bridge maybe even the pigeon on the general's head but you are not even close to being the field of cornflowers at dusk and a quick look in the mirror will show that you are neither the boots in the corner nor the boat asleep in its boathouse it might interest you to know speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world that i am the sound of rain on the roof i also happen to be the shooting star the evening paper blowing down an alley and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table i am also the moon in the trees and the blind woman's teacup but don't worry i am not the bread and the knife you are still the bread and the knife you will always be the bread and the knife not to mention the crystal goblet and somehow the wine so like art religion is concerned with these moments of access with the places where human feeling seems to escape is proper bounds in the religious context we call it we often call it transcendence without really quite specifying what it is we are transcending the ordinary the normal the proportional or dreaded favorite word of Mormons the appropriate unlike art religion doesn't usually try to explain or express this excess in human terms it attributes excess to the divine makes it originate outside of the human heart or postpones its iteration to an afterlife this is the moment where i i i might if i'm feeling really brave try to get who sings in here you're you're all we can sing this right all right who's got perfect pitch anybody got an s of course you do of course you have a pitch pipe okay so can you see all right all right i'll leave don't sing like Mormons sing faster i knew you could do it so that that's romanticism in a religious context right this moment of being lost in wonder love and praise that's that's how we that's how we do religious excess of feeling right um the title of my talk uh well let's just say religion calls this excess of feeling miraculous it's really interesting that that mica talked about miracles because you can see where we're where we're going here um and but we religion calls the inexplicable miraculous and leaves it at that right the title of my talk comes from a poem of um Richard Wilbur who is a professor at Wesleyan university for a long time and i think this perfectly captures the impulse of religion to deal with excess is miracle says saint john tells how at cana's wedding feast the water pots poured wine in such amount that by his sober count there were a hundred gallons at the least it made no earthly sense unless to show how whatsoever love elects to bless brims to a sweet excess that can without depletion overflow which is to say that what love sees is true that this world's fullness is not made but found life hungers to abound and pour out its plenty for such as you um of course as many transhumanist thinkers have been at pains to point out religion is not just about what to do with a surfeit of happiness and love it excuses all excesses of feeling including anger vengefulness and lust with reference to extra human beings the devil made me do it or worse god told me to do it as justification for slavery sexism even genocide religious attempts to cope with and suppress perceived excesses of feeling or feelings that are unusual or difficult have a long history of provoking tribalism persecution inquisition and war um so these moments of of feeling of feeling escaping demand attention and it seems to me that um in preferring the rational over the emotional and preferring the secular to the religious um among transhumanists that that that we miss something important that we that we allied questions that that have to be answered somehow and so far at least no form either literary or musical or artistic or scientific has managed to describe the human experience in a way that doesn't leave a remainder a little bit left of life's hunger to abound seems to me that whether we find that remainder frustrating or joyous will make an enormous difference in the rational systems and practices we try to create do we want to improve the human condition because we find death too fearsome to bear or is it because we believe that love can cast out that fear um this is the embarrassing point in my talk where I confess that I am so ignorant of the state of play and transhumanist thought that I initially turned to wikipedia to map out a crash course for myself uh one helpful page listed several works of fiction that might be considered transhumanist along with helpful one line summaries of their major plot lines or themes several of the suggested books were described as quote utopia or dystopia depending on your point of view now far be it from me the token humanists to cast stones here but that struck me as decidedly unsciency and actually provided a port of entry for me into this unfamiliar work I was looking for ways that point of view might matter in transhumanist thought projects or experience or experiments um there's a moment in margaret at what's a handmade tale and I know you're all going to tell me in the q and a that that's not really transhumanism and it's it's okay um but there's this moment where the protagonist is speaking with one of the overlords of the dystopia and he reveals the fundamental rationale by which well-intentioned people had managed to make life a living hell for most of the population particularly the female half of the population but for most of everyone towards the end of the novel the narrator of fred has seduced her commander into an illicitly and dangerously humane relationship they do things like playing scrabble and reading magazines together and most dangerous of all just talking eventually she gets him to tell her about why and how the world changed from the one she remembered which is roughly um life in the 80s or 90s in a medium sized post feminist american city and his chilling explanation explanation is this you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs we thought we could do it better but better never means better for everyone it always means worse for some and that I think is a fundamental dividing line between utopia and dystopia is life is goodness scarce or abundant everything depends on how we answer this question do we want to live longer and be smarter because we sense life's hunger to abound or because we are afraid of death are we trying to multiply joy or merely escape grief it seems to me that Mormonism has particularly rich strains of both impulses the fear of death and the longing for life to continue in its overflowing goodness we don't need to look farther than the founding prophet Joseph Smith for an embodied lesson in how these feelings coexist even in the same consciousness uh samuel brown has poignantly argued that earliest Mormonism was compelled and even obsessed with death um he quotes Joseph Smith at a funeral sermon for adam arcs saying all men know that all men must die what is the object of our coming into existence then falling away to be here no more this is a subject we ought to study more than any other which we ought to study day and night he expressed similar sentiments on many occasions his funeral sermons were the locus of much of joseph's most elaborate theological work sometimes he seemed to want to keep the feelings evoked by the contemplation of death bounded in some sort of rational proportion faithful to the religious reasoning he was working out so he said at another funeral when we lose a near and dear friend upon whom we have set our hearts it should be a caution to us not to set our affections too firmly upon others knowing that they may in like manner be taken from us our affection should be placed upon god and his work more intensely than our on our fellow beings but then he contradicts himself again right of course you all know the place in the doctrine covenants where he says that we should live together in love in so much that we shall weep for those who are who mourn so like most of us Joseph wasn't entirely able able to pull off the equanimity he believed his religious convictions ought to provide in yet another funeral sermon for jesse barnes he said when i heard of the death of our beloved brother barnes it would not have affected me so much if i had the opportunity of burying him in the land of zion i've said father i desire to die here among the saints but if this is not thy will and i go hence and die wilt thou find some kind friend to bring my body back and gather up my friends who have fallen in foreign lands and bring them up hither that we may all lie together and may we contemplate these things so yes if we learn how to live and how to die when we lie down we contemplate how we may rise in the morning and it is pleasing for friends to lie down together locked in the arms of love to sleep and wake in each other's embrace and renew their conversation so they're his his yearning for the earthly the physical the actual togetherness of friends sort of escapes the the notion that that death would would take people away who can't can't ultimately bear it even though he he tries to um his human affection and care for his friends and especially for his family constantly overflowed the bounds of the religious forms he was creating um see for instance these accounts of his feelings when he organized the church and baptized his own father um these are really beautiful i hope you can see that um so this is from um lucy max smith's account of the founding of the church and the part on the left is her unpublished manuscript and then the the version on the right is the one that she published but look at the parts that that don't appear in the published version she says joseph stood on the shore when his father came out of the water and as he took him by the hand he cried out oh my god i have lived to see my father baptized into the true church of jesus christ and he covered his face and wept and um and sobbed upon his father's bosom like a child wept aloud for joy as joseph old when he became beheld his father coming up into the land of egypt um and then in the diary of joseph night he says there's one thing i will mention that evening that old brother smith and martin harris was baptized joseph was filled to the spirit to a great degree to see his father and mr harris that he had been with so much he burst out with great with grief and joy and seemed as though the world could not hold him he went out into the lot and appeared to want to get out of sight of everybody and would sob and cry and seem to be so full that he could not live oliver and i went after him and came to him and after a while he came in but he was the most wrought upon that i ever saw any man his joy seemed to be full um so while joseph would go on to try to systematize and codify the enduring familial frameworks for human affection i love these accounts of the founding moment of the mormon church already in his first attempt to make a religious system and ordinances out of his revelatory experiences joseph complicated affection for his father completely overflows the bounds of decorum and even of language seems to me that mormonism has ever since that moment existed in a constant struggle between the need to systematize and organize the church create a religion and the equally urgent need to imbue these reasoned and appropriate forms of religious expression with the kinds of transcendent messy sobbing joy that overwhelmed joseph when he baptized baptized his father it seems to me that we are and have been for a few decades in a mormon moment where the comfort of systems and rules and authority as christopher was talking about has has mostly overtaken the longing for the uncontainable excess that also inheres in mormonism's optimistic insistence on human beings expansive and even godly potentialities i find a delicious and sort of provocative irony in the ways that the mormon transhumanist project though itself eager and optimistic about technological and scientific modes of systematizing also might rediscover the exuberant and inventorsome spirit that animated these earliest mormons of mormonism like the romantic poets trying to dismember the old forms in order to reanimate them the ideas that you are pursuing can be constructive and invigorating to the old forms of mormonism but turning away for a second from mormonism i want to close with a practical example of how working in a framework of abundance might change real world events and practice many of you will have seen this news report in the last couple of days this i'm going to just read it from the smithsonian magazine's blog um why would scientists revive a thousand-year-old medical recipe for a fallow smelling concoction they suspected it could have very real benefits and it turns out they were right an anglo-saxon brew kills methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus or mursa when microbiologist fraya harrison chatted with christina lee an anglo-saxon medievalist she was intrigued by a nasty sounding recipe involves leech book a thousand-year-old compendium of medical advice and proportion and potions the recipe was recommended to fight infected eyelash follicles involves crop leak and garlic of equal quantities take wine and bullock skull mix with the leak let stand nine days in the brass vessel etc and and so intrigued by this possibility they actually made up a batch of this stuff let it sit in the lab for nine days and then tried it out on some mursa bacteria on mouse skin and it killed about 90 of it which is as good or better than the rate for the the best conventional antibiotics we have now we often speak in university and medical and technological context of of scarcity right we cut funding to arts and humanities in favor of stem fields and that seems like a pretty rational thing to do there's you know science is practical it they make stuff and you know i love a lot of medievalists but most of the time what they do seems as practical as an extended montipython sketch right which is not to say that it's useless the world would be impoverished without them and we need the irrational and exuberant abundance of the useless the silly the impractical the religious the kiss that the child poet breathes out in her artless song both are religious striving towards salvation and our scientific technological transhumanist striving towards better lives here and now depend on whether or not we are able to believe that better can in fact mean better for everyone that life hungers to a bound and pour out its plenty such poor it's plenty out for such as you and for all of us for the most expansive definition of us that we can conceive otherwise i can just make you sing some more got that was fun yeah yeah sure um i this is my seventh year of editing a dialogue i'm almost done void peterson will take over next year and subscriptions have um have increased slightly um really slightly over the last um over that time period um which in an age when most print publications are are falling precipitously feels pretty good i think uh the trouble that we and you know most print publications are facing is that um people don't read um long form anything anymore and the other interesting thing is that i think um dialogue and sunstone and some of those independent publications for a long time um served a function that was outside of their content that was external to their content and we didn't really realize it but but what dialogue said over and over and over again to people as it arrived in the mailbox was you're not alone um and that was really the most important content of dialogue for decades i think and um and that message is now available online all the time you know 24 hours a day in whatever um you know constellation or ideological flavor you would like it and blogs just do that community function much better so um it's it uh it's been it's been interesting to try to sort of find our way into those sort of short form conversations and try to say well yes but you know actually this this wheel you're reinventing someone else built a really good one about 25 years ago and you could just go over here and read it so um you know i think we're facing mostly the same the same struggles that most print publications are and i see it as a problem of form not so much of ideology i i feel like ideologically the church is that the climate in Mormonism is is good for for what we're trying to do a dialogue and yeah one two three oh that's easy um oh sure um yeah he he just asked me how to um how to deal with the problem of earth scarce resources um in in 10 words or less basically um so or and how that conflicts with this idea that there is abundance right with you know the the Mormon way to say it is that there's enough and to spare um i think that um most of our greediest most destructive consumption um comes out of this sense that there's not enough and that we better grab all we can and then some more just in case um and it it seems to me that at least in my own life when i really am opera i mean i don't i'm not sure that i do this with physical resources i'm thinking now more in terms of feeling and um but i i think it works i think it translates into the physical world that um that when i'm uh less worried about getting more stuff and more grateful i mean the the paradigm of abundance right leads to a sense of gratitude and fullness and when you have that sense of fullness then you don't need stuff to fill up the empty spaces and um i mean that's a really sort of facile um gloss but but i do think that that most of this sort of most destructive western consumption comes from this sense of trying to fill a lack somehow um with with stuff that ultimately doesn't fill it and that leads to more and more consumption so just breaking out of that paradigm i think maybe would go a long ways thanks and also i am quite late to say maybe this is actually what the mission of the mta is one of the things that i really despair of when i live in northern california i tell is um when i see um i'll just call them the first ones um who are who have the means and the determination to work on the technological underpinnings that could be the basis for this journey that's very often i see personalities that is one of the kind of commanding positions with the most resource personalities that i really are it spawns the question that you asked in the very beginning is this a good thing and and so most of the books that i've read i've read quite a few um when they come to say you know and what will we do once we become immortal and data and so on and and one of the books that i recently read by marquine rothblood says well of course there will still be movies after all they'll all be there and so you'll want to get together with your cyber friend at information code package all day and watch movies and what else do you like to do if you like to play cards sure you could do that and she lists like a dozen things that i mean or you know like going bowling you know and that's what you can come up with well it seems that the people who are working on it often have an emotional that and i i don't mean this insulting to anybody who's experienced but we're just close to autistic there's no there there there's a fascination with procedure there's a fascination with the process there's an assumption that we simply want more of this stuff which my son's like right now a hotel and and so i isn't the mission of groups like this to actually try to inform things that don't pay because there is no shortage believing a mighty worker people who say we need more no we've got a billion of them and they all do the same thing it's a it's all apps they live in apps world and they get funding for that and we're trying to find people who want to do things like spread emotional wealth there's no market for it but we're saying but that's the best thing that we can do with this stuff so or what we're saying in this conference is that we're announcing that that is the point and that we're trying to find a way to leverage this minority viewpoint which doesn't have a lot of power and money is that what this is? Should it be Christine? Well i'm going to mostly defer to Lincoln because you are way out of my depth there but but i'll just say that that maybe um maybe the mission ought to be to yeah um um great okay um so um the question was about sort of the the personalities maybe leaders in the transhumanist movement people who have the resources and the technical skill to make some of these things happen seem sometimes to not have an emotionally or spiritually rich vision of of what they're trying to create that they're fascinated by the technological possibilities and sometimes lose sight of the humanist ones is that fair okay um and i think that that may be the the right approach to that question is not to not to try and proselytize to people whose temperaments are different than ours but but to just make room for more for more kinds of people to you know do insane things like inviting me here to give this talk and you know getting me thereby to you know watch a bunch of Kurzweil TED talks and um you know learn a little bit about this stuff and and see if there's a way in for for other kinds of visions you know make sure that the medievalist is talking to the microbiologist all right there's another one be be gentle that's the only place that word exists in the English language so great okay so um let me try to restate that one so um language is insufficient we can't really articulate the most important spiritual truths of our lives like atonement in in language we we reach for words like infinite and incomprehensible supernal to describe this thing because we we can't translate it into practical terms and and and i i seemed to be arguing and i think i was that um that it's good anyway to keep reaching for these for these terms um and and why so what do we get from from still trying to express to f the ineffable as it were right um to uh you know to say the thing that can't be said um so um i think we let me let me uh joseph smith talked once about trying to escape the narrow crooked prison of words and um he had this sense all the time and you i think in the doctor in covenants you read it all the time that he's sort of he he says over you know we saw these things we can't record them we we don't under in the book of Mormon you know all these things like they can't be uttered and um but we have to try right i mean that's we're built as humans so that's why we do metaphors that's why um you know billy collins laughs at at the ways that we talk to our beloved but we still do it and it means something to us we like hearing those metaphors and so um i i think it's just that that language is is all we have i mean we we can reckon and part of what um the romantics offer that's useful is to say language isn't you know to just acknowledge that the form the form won't hold and that um that that we're always aiming at something too big um for us to manage um i actually think that maybe the baroque is a better um a better example um you know there are these moments and i here i'm going to be lost for words too but many of you probably know this experience of um listening or i have it most often when playing Bach where you know it's a it's a perfect fugue there's nothing there's nothing outside of the form and yet all of a sudden there's this space that opens up in that melody that just um it and i don't know how to describe it other than that a sort of space that happens between between the bars between the the rigid form that there's just suddenly this sense of expansion and um i think i think that's why we keep reaching for better words to describe what we're trying to do we're hoping that eventually will come on the form that that escapes itself um and lets us feel that space in in the form um but yeah i sorry i'm i i don't know but yeah that we need more more forms an abundance of forms and eventually we get something like what we need