 Hello. My name is John Bolesky, and I want to start out by saying two things. The first is that I'm incredibly sorry not to be here with you today. I did like to go, but for various family reasons it turned out not to be workable this year. I've been fortunate enough to attend the last three MTA annual conferences, though, and I've had a blast during each and every one of them. The talks, of course, will still be recorded for me to watch. I may very well be listening to them right now, depending on how the livestreaming is going. Hey, if I'm watching, hi me. But the conversations with both old and new friends is something that, at least this year, will unfortunately escape me. The second thing I want to say is that I'm an anthropologist. This may sound a bit random. After all, everyone in the MTA has a day job of some sort or another. However, by being an anthropologist that germane today, in two different ways, it was through anthropology that I first became aware of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, but also anthropology is central to the argument of my talk today. My being an anthropologist explains my ties to the association because, with the blessing of the board of directors of the MTA, I have been conducting an almost four-year-long ethnographic study of religious transhumanism, with the weight of it focusing on Mormon transhumanism. I'm happy to say that some of my first published writings on the MTA will be coming out this year. The pairing is part of an edited volume on theology and anthropology that is soon to be published by Oxford University Press. I'll be saying a lot more about anthropology later on, but as I'm sure most of you know, anthropology is predicated on participant observation. While there is some quantitative research, most of anthropology is qualitative and consists of interviews and observations. Anthropology has sometimes jokingly been called the science of just hanging out, but also consists of participating, of doing the same sort of activities that the people you're working with, while they're doing them as well. And to be honest, that was what this presentation initially was to me, an opportunity to do what MTA members, or at least a significant number of MTA members do, namely, think out loud about transhumanism and religion. But the more I worked in my talk, the more I became enraptured with the challenge of transhumanism, not as an anthropological problem, but as a problem in and of itself. This became an opportunity to think of transhumanism, not as a social phenomenon that has to be put in context and unpacked, but rather as an epistemological and ontological challenge in its own right. And it's my hope that you'll find my particular approach to this problem interesting as well. And even if it is a little bit heavy on the social science, I think it might have some wider implications and could spark some conversation. And the problem is this. What does transhumanism mean for social science to understand itself as the science of the human? Saying the anthropology is a science that the human may seem to be going a bit far, perhaps overreading the Greek anthros that predicated the suffix logy, grounded in the Greek logia. But if you think of other social sciences, they carve out only a determinant section of the human activity. Think of sociology's self presentation as the study of society as a causal or emergent force. Political science is the study of contestation and collective decision making. Economics is the study of exchange, and so on. By way of contrast, anthropology has always presented itself as a science of the human, specializing not in any particular field of human endeavor, but rather in the connections and resonances between disparate phenomena found among various domains. This is particularly true of the anthropological tradition I was trained in. The American variant of the discipline known as Boasian, or for field anthropology. Now, America has had anthropological authors during the 19th century, such as Louis Henry Morgan and Frank Hamilton Cushing. But anthropology was really established in the United States as an academic institution and intellectual program by Franz Boas. Actor from the 1880s to the 1940s, Boas was a German Jewish emigrate who was originally trained in physics, but turned to anthropology as attempted to disprove the discriminatory racial theories of the day. He also used anthropology as a weapon to combat eugenics, which was then enjoying a great deal of popularity in America. Because Boas had to at once show that it was culture non inheritance, you create the sort of human differences that were then thought to be bred into different strains of humanity, and also because in addition to arguing for culture, he had to disprove biological racist causal accounts. Boas in the American anthropologists who came after him saw archaeology, linguistics, physical anthropology, and the study of culture and society as all being proper anthropological sub-disciplines tied together by the common thread of the human. Anthropology was to be an integrative science, unified phenomena rather than splintering them into separate intellectual silos. It was because of this ambition that anthropology expanded the scope well beyond the small scale societies, then called savages, that were its original focus in the late 19th and early 20th century. Over the 20th century, it would eventually widen its treatment to include peasants, urban members of the non West, and eventually even your American societies and cultures that had fostered the foundations of anthropology in the first instance. At the time, anthropology eventually expanded to the point where there were researchers who conducted entirely in world geographies of virtual spaces such as Second Life and the World of Warcraft. In the course of its investigation, anthropology has created a very particular picture of the human. One isn't once expensive in the powers that awards the human animal, but crippling the vulnerability that sees as constituting the human as well. Both these stances are rooted in the anthropological understanding of humans as being at their core, incredibly plastic animals. As a strength, this is an understanding of the human as an incredibly adaptable creature. Using tools such as language and culture, humans can disseminate new techniques and approaches at a rate that far outpaces older forms of information propagation, such as genetic reproduction. Furthermore, these new techniques can be produced intentionally rather than having to engage in an effectively blind genetic commentary search for effective solutions. As a weakness, however, this is a picture of a creature incredibly dependent upon culture. Absent linguistic and cultural programming of the human is effectively an ape without instincts to guide him or her, or kin to work in conjunction with. The romanticism of the story, such as the jungle book put to the side, the life expectancy and degree of thriving enjoyed by fertile children can be safely characterized as not good. The focus on the seeming plastic and open capacity of the human and the unformed weakness of the human as well may be a function of how anthropology operates. With the exception of some biological anthropologists interested in human development, anthropological comparisons are interhuman comparisons, moments where different groups are contrasted with one another to see what is particular to each of them. What is shared, however, escapes from anthropological attention in this operation. But it's what is shared that's most at risk when it comes to transhumanism, the sort of transformations that transhumanism heralds in such a shift in what Marx called species being, to say we were human in the old way would no longer be accurate or truthful. This, of course, is on the one hand something that we have always been experiencing. Since the first instance of either weaponry or medicine, technologies have always been expanding the capacities available to the species. But certain capacities are being imagined to possibly soon come about due to advances in the fields of nanotechnology, cryonics, bioengineering and artificial intelligence are exponentially greater than here to four extent technologies. Where there may be some formal resemblance between medical capacities to, on one hand, prolonged life or temporary stay of death, the other hand, achieve immortality or resurrection. Substantively, they're in a very different order. Differences in degree become differences in kind. The political, ethical, economic and pragmatic challenge of the advent of such technical capacities are a transformation of world historical order. So asking what transcending the human might mean for anthropology may seem to be a misplaced set of priorities. But today I'm not thinking about challenges raised by big data or the possibility of artificial intelligence is writing ethnography or even the collapse of the university model of intellectual production, though these are all admittedly profound issues. Rather, I'm concerned with something that might be considered to be a greater challenge than that. So the degree that anthropology is no longer conceptually able to engage in or even imagine the collective or individual life worlds of post-human figures. This methodological or theoretical failure might serve as a sort of canary in the coal mine, signaling the depth of the degree of the transformation, the shift, and also indicating when that shift is working for not some more full instantiation of the human, but rather for some form of desubjectification. If the tools and theories used by the science of the human are no longer applicable, then perhaps the object of study is not simply built upon the human, but has rather left the human behind. To be clear, not all transformations will necessarily result in something that is beyond the anthropological remit or beyond ethnographic techniques. Moments for transformations in both speed and capacity are roughly similarly scaled, such as the ratios. The various human possibilities remain the same. Even as those capacities change, we'll pose no problem for future ethnographers, even if both the ethnographer and the population that he or she documents are no longer human in the biological sense of things. Let me give one example of the failure to those who attended last year's conference. The scenario outlined in Robin Hansen, for instance, in the age of M may be an example of something transcending the human, while still being recognizable to the human sciences. Hansen imagines a highly accelerated, entirely virtual society, comprised entirely of emulations of once living people. Due to the differences in material conditions that come with the shift to entirely virtual subjects, as well as the several orders of magnitude faster pace that would be associated with scenarios afters would operate under a different economic logic than that which we're normally used to. But even virtualized and accelerated is his emulations of the human minds are in Hansen's account. As he describes them, they are still recognizably human to the extent that we could speak of the culture or society of these emulations. In fact, though, Hansen doesn't posit this as part of a scenario, we could imagine an emulation whose task is to communicate with documents and theorize the nature of M's and the structure of and causal forces behind what we would call M society. It's a world where one could imagine an ethnographer, not a human ethnographer, of course, but perhaps emulation of the human ethnographer, documenting this emerging society through the sort of participant observation techniques that have long been at the center of anthropological practice. But then M's aren't our limit. The problem really arises when the transformation either doesn't keep up roughly the same set of ratios between various individually and has capacities or where the transformation structurally alters relations between various human faculties. The example I have in mind is a thought experiment by the philosopher Paul Churchland, an experiment which is sometimes referred to as Churchland's centipede. Churchland's experiment starts with an observation regarding the genetic condition referred to as colossal aginesis, where the individual is born without a corpus callosum, the neural structure that we might think of as a bridge between the two cerebral hemispheres that constitute the average human brain. The information is that this does not result when there are cases of this disease. In any obvious impairment displaying a neural instead of a cultural plasticity, the two hemispheres learn to share communicative information without this major artery of enter hemispheric communication. Churchland's question is this, if these two halves of the human brain can learn to communicate, can spatially separate a human brain's likewise learn to communicate and integrate their actions by way of some technical supplementation in the same seamless way that two hemispheres do. If directly networked, humans could directly experience a sensory recognition of other minds resulting in a utopic new mode of life. But like the philosopher David Rowden notes, Churchill's centipede would also come with the elimination of mental primacy, the obsolescence of older forms of media and communication, such as language and the lack of a reliance on the now collective brain on any particular individual body. Considering this, Rowden suggests that the collectivity dreamed up by churchland is no longer human. More importantly for Rowden, it's no longer clear if they it would have an either the central world or our moral community in the same way that we do, given the changes to perception and the erasure of individuality. We could go back and forth in this issue, but one clear way of cutting the gory knot would be to ask whether it would be possible to think of this in highly anthropological terms or study it through ethnographic methods. It seems that we cannot. In such an entity, we would have we would have what was language become instead of neural activity and what was culture would become instead habit. More importantly, neither process would demand any kind of external instantiation for better logical or communicative purposes. The only way to know such an entity would be to join in and after joining in any resulting knowledge would not be ethnography, but rather autobiography or self reflection. This is not to say that the creation of such an entity would be a bad thing. Perhaps the creation of a perfectly transparent and perfectly inter empathic hive mind would be an ethical achievement. My point is merely to note that unlike the emulations of the human brain discussed earlier, this would be an agent that even as it is comprised of connected constituent human parts, no longer be human the sense that is amenable to anthropological investigation through either observation in the sense of peer-to-peer communication or participation, the sense of engaging in like activities that the individuals who constitute the group being studied. It is interesting to note that entirely virtual, completely non-biological entities that live outside, who live out eons in what are to us seconds, are by this test human in ways that biological humans operating at our time scale in our material world would not be after a relatively small technological modification of direct brain-to-brain neural networking. Before I leave, though, I want to say one more thing. I've leaned heavily on the T in MTA, but even though I have no Mormon background, apart from this research project, I feel I should at least touch on the M here. If we take God, either as already existing or as aspirational being, as a technical achievement, a modification of either a homo sapien sapien or some thing sufficiently like a homo sapien sapien, how would this entity be assessed by my proposed anthropological test? I'm not asking if we could have an anthropologist in a fifth helmet wandering around in the introductory cloud scene of the 1989 production of Saturday's Warriors, taking breaks from shining up premortal entities to drop by and check out how Mother and Father God are doing that day. Rather, I think that my entirely hypothetical question might mean a rereading of the passages, such as D and C 130, are the 19th century speculative discussions of the relations between and sociability of the gods. We're not suggesting that such an exercise would produce anything like theological knowledge, but it might be worth considering, though, even if in a subjective and aspirational mode, if for no other reason than to guide our experiments with radical technology by asking what it is that would make God human. Thank you for your time.