 Next up, we have Jacob Baker, who is a PhD student in philosophy of religion and theology at Claremont Graduate University. He's working on a doctoral dissertation that explores the inherent unthinkability of the problem of evil in philosophy and theology as central to its status as a problem. Jacob, come on up. So the clicker's not here, right? Just making sure. Is it the arrows? Or do I have the same problem as Blair? Try the arrows. Maybe it's a certain combination of the arrows. Secret MTA combination. Keyboard network. Luckily, there's no technological aspect of this association. Or else this might be kind of a comparison. It's the parakeeter. For the total breakdown of everything in a close humanity level. Could it be that you control it in the back? What's that? I can make some music from the back. Oh. You could do that. I also have my own computer, but that would probably work. Or I could just kind of read it off and you'll just have to use your imagination. I could probably follow along. Sorry. I could read the computer in the back. That's okay. Well, you can actually do that if you want. And I could just read it or something, so to you. It's not the most amazing PowerPoint presentation. It was supplemental. I can show it through the back. Blair's. Okay. Yeah, that's fine. Sure. All right. So at the beginning of the conference, Chris mentioned that there was this concerted effort to... Can everyone hear me? It seems like it's a little bit... I don't know how to raise it. Is that any better? How's that? That's going to get a little uncomfortable. So he mentioned that there was this concerted effort to focus as much on the T as on the M of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. But I am personally more interested in the A because while I am a Mormon, I don't know that I identify personally as a transhumanist, but I have friends that are transhumanists and that's what interests me most about transhumanism. So it's more the association of people that want to get together under a certain basket of ideas. And I don't really care what those ideas are that much. I just like associating with people. But also as a philosopher, I'm very interested in ideas. And I've been trying to explore... So this presentation was kind of an exploration of what I could really find compelling about Mormon transhumanism. Because I've been kind of a philosophical critic to a certain degree. And that's partly because I follow the pessimistic tradition of philosophy to a certain extent. And transhumanism to me seems enormously optimistic. So it's almost like my joker to my Batman in a sense. And so this is an exercise more or less in the extension of the hermeneutics of charity. In trying to figure out the nuggets of things that I think are really compelling from an outsider's point of view. I kind of feel like unfrozing cavemen lawyer to a certain extent. Have you seen the SNL skit with Phil Hartman from the 80s? Where he's like, your world frightens and confuses me. It feels a little bit like that to me. And so this is me trying to dip my toes in sincerely to the transhumanist world. Okay, just making sure what's up there is on here. So yeah, why so skeptical in the first place? Well, one of those reasons is because as someone who follows the pessimistic tradition a little more closely than most, I'm a little bit skeptical of the broader idea of human progress. Not so much of certain developments within human constructivism like technological developments or cultural developments and things of that nature. Obviously those things develop and they advance. I'm just, when you look at the entire big picture of things, to think that there's this linear progress from an ancient time to the present time, I'm a little bit skeptical of that idea. And this is partly because when you look at the history of human thought and advancement, there were some changes in time consciousness in the late medieval and early modern period where humans went from thinking in kind of cyclical ways to thinking in much more linear fashion. The idea of linearity then was sutured to the idea of progress. Yet linearity need not be inherently progressive. Change can occur, but not necessarily permanently for the better. Technologies have obviously improved. The powers of science have been manifested again and again. But these are often related to greater sets of costs. And as science touched the core of the human condition, what if history is in the end ironic? Everything appears to be getting better when actually it's getting worse or just no better at all. We cannot help it seems, but to be drawn to ideas of progress, not necessarily because they're real, but because anything else would be too painful to bear. We're kind of in the middle of it and we have to make the most of it. Okay, so if you want to go to the next slide. The following three critics are what I kind of call the trinity. I actually go to the next slide again. The trinity of skeptics, is that what I called it in the thing? Yeah, there it is. The trinity of transhumanist skepticism. And this is more like a trinity, not necessarily the trinity. Not being as familiar with transhumanist ideas as many of you are there. I probably miss some really key philosophers that have criticisms of the ideas that transhumanism promotes. But these are three that I have found compelling in the past. And so I'm going to outline what it is that they say, and then I'm going to try to respond in a charitable way and push back a little against their ideas. So let's start with Thomas Legotti, who is actually a fictionist and who wrote one particular philosophical treatise that I really like a lot, which is the Philosophical Basis for the true detective series, if any of you are familiar with that. It's called Conspiracy Against the Human Race. And transhumanism gets some ink in that particular work. I'm sure it's been excoriated in various forums by transhumanists, and I didn't have the time to go and research that and figure out if anyone's actually said anything about that. But essentially he has a problem with what he calls future filia, which is essentially this positive optimistic obsession that the future is going to be good. Not just that it will just inherently be good no matter what we do, but that we actually have the capacity to make a good future. And he is a future foe. He doesn't think humanity has a future at all. And frankly he's an extremist in a lot of senses that doesn't totally work, but he essentially says that evolution, it being true, tells us that we got made. We didn't bring ourselves out of the primeval ooze. Everything we've done is a consequence of being made. We do what we were made to do, period. Nature still has plans for us, and those plans could very well be nothing that we would think of as good. He says transhumanists need being alive to be vastly more alright than it is. And that's the underlying assumption of his entire work, is that being alive is not alright. The whole book is essentially an exploration of that idea. That we are going nowhere and have never been going anywhere is not actually a curable condition. Although going nowhere at the fastest possible velocity, which is what he considers transhumanism to be, might be curable, but probably not. What if the ideal being at the end of evolution is one who finally realizes that the best of all possible worlds is useless. And not just useless, but malignantly useless. And since the human condition is untouchable, so we can create technologies that can intervene in our mortality or immortality and cure diseases, et cetera, et cetera, but that which makes us human, that's more questionable that that can be manipulated. What if self-extinction is the optimal course to take and our enlightenment through our post-humanity is to realize that finally. Moving on to Slavoj Žižek. His question is, where is the autonomous subject who freely decides to change its own nature? On the one hand, I'm the object of my interventions, that which has properties that can be manipulated and changed. But on the other hand, I act as if I'm somehow exempt from this manipulation, acting at a distance deciding how and where to intervene in myself. But what if the loop gets closed or even more terrifyingly has already gotten closed? So that my very power of decision-making gets meddled with and the autonomous subject disappears. How might my interventions have affected the definition of my humanity? So his final question then is, can the free autonomous individual survive the passage into the post-human era? And perhaps there's a sense in which we are no longer free autonomous individuals, we just haven't realized it yet. And finally, Mary Shelley. Now, Shelley for many, many reasons is very, very different from Žižek and Lugati. The subtitle of her famous work, Frankenstein, is a modern Prometheus, taken from one version of the Greek tale of the titan whom Zeus commissioned to create humankind, but whom Zeus then punished for allowing humans to have fire, thereby allowing them to advance and evolve. One of the primary morals of the story is the consequence of the naive, the mostly innocent hubris and ambition of Viktor Frankenstein, or Frankenstein if you prefer, who sought to create life only to have it ravage him in completely unanticipated ways. Perhaps most interesting, however, is his conclusion that humankind seems doomed to pursue knowledge, almost as if we're addicted to pursuing knowledge and advancement and progress, and we could never stop if we tried, even at the cost of the tranquility of simple pleasures and relationships with others. And that's one of the main themes of the Frankenstein work. Okay, if you want to go to the next one. In the end, really, transhumanism is just a story, like other stories. It exists to bring people together to do certain things, create groups, social bonds, etc. And depending on how this story is told, the trajectory toward a particular end will be different. Alistair McIntyre, the famous virtue theorist, once said, I can only answer the question, why am I to do if I can answer the prior question of what story or stories do I find myself a part? It seems to be that we want to locate ourselves in stories, especially in relationships to others. This is both the appeal and the problem of transfigurism, as I understand it, which I probably completely don't. But if you'll kind of bear with me and take what my understanding is, it kind of, there's a valid chain of premises here. On the one hand, it problematizes the story of transhumanism further by not ignoring the religious question of transcendence. Because obviously religious transhumanism can't ignore the religious question of transcendence. But on the other hand, that question is a vital part of human stories. And not just in terms of the divine, but also in terms of what it means to be human in the first place. The problem of transcendence is the problem of reconciling a seemingly imminent human subjective experience in being with the religious proposition that there is something beyond being. If you want to go to the next slide. But as James Faulkner, who is a BYU professor of philosophy, nicely lays out following Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion, other people are also transcendent as persons. To experience another person as a person is not to experience an object, a being among beings within being, one more tool in my world. But instead it is exposure to one who disengages me from my world of objects. In this sense, the other person is infinite and therefore otherwise than being. Otherwise than the usual assembly of objects in my world. Faulkner, borrowing a phrase from Gabriel Marcell, refers to this as trans-ascendance. In relation to God, we are drawn out of ourselves toward and by someone infinitely higher. Someone to whom we are indebted and someone by whom we are judged. The other person, however, is the figure of God toward whom we trans-ascend. In relation to another person, and I can only be an I in relation to persons, I am transcendent. The other person interrupts my interiority and brings me outside myself and my world. So there's an important sense then in which we transcend one another. This offers an interesting response to our three critics. Go ahead and go to the next slide. And I had actually a little fun animations with captions. As I mentioned these critics, I don't know if you want to try to recreate that. You can have some fun back there. To legati, we might say that while we might not be ultimately going anywhere worthwhile, it could be that our relationships might be a kind of ultimate teleology. So not the end goal of a destination, but relationship itself is an end goal. Relationships could just be ends in themselves, regardless of how far we progress or regress. To Zizek, we might ask if the autonomous free individual, so sacrosanct in western thought, maybe it shouldn't be, is the right model for persons who cannot exist as persons without one another, in which personhood is a messy entanglement of subjectivities and interpersonal bedazzlements rather than flesh containers in which free decisions are made. To Shelley, on the other hand, we might assent to the notion that simple pleasures and relationships constitute the essence of the human, while at the same time positing that a more cautious application of growing knowledge is compatible with this more meaningful project. Broadly speaking, and again as far as I understand it, transfigurism fits into these responses in an interesting way that might salvage the transhumanist impulse for me. It seems to me that transfigurism is a system of thought that takes both the phenomenology of transascendence and its own future consummation seriously. In other words, from what I understand, because of the specific Mormon religious undergirdings of transfigurism, which mark out a ritual understanding of human relationships with one another, and with God, the role of human relationships and their preservation is given a place of paramount importance. But also, as a system of thought, transfigurism thinks its own consummation and transcendence. So it's not just a system of thought that thinks transcendence in particular ways, it itself is concerned with transascendence as a system of thought. In other words, it thinks how to transcend itself. If the primary goal of this relationship engineering and preservation is ultimately theosis, then to achieve Godhood is to consummate or fulfill the system or superstructure designed to achieve that end. In other words, transfigurism in theory is willing to climb the ladder that it created or that it sees within its religious underpinnings to its own death to take seriously the teleology of such a superstructure as a means and not as an end. Once achieved, it tips the ladder over, as it were, or perhaps it builds another ladder or finds a new ladder. If this is true, it avoids the religious criticism of idolatry by not putatively being self-concerned and self-interested but pointed at something larger it is willing to be subsumed in and the broader philosophical criticism of pointless and possibly even malevolent superhuman engineering for the sake of itself. Thank you.