Technological Evolution
Technological evolution rejects the belief that human nature is static, recognizing the impact of both biological evolution and historical development driven by cultural and technological change. It acknowledges that humanity has continually evolved and will continue to do so. This perspective is grounded in the idea of active participation in the evolutionary process. It emphasizes shaping our future via culture and technology toward superhuman existence.
This is a list of articles that Lincoln Cannon has written about technological evolution. A full archive of all articles that Lincoln has published since 2005 is also available. You may also search for articles and other content that's available on any of Lincoln's websites.
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Our Spiritual and Technological Evolution
As the line between human and artificial life is increasingly blurred, our apprehension in the apocalypse of intelligence is steadily mounting. This escalating fear may be, even arguably is, inevitable. Humans fear the unfamiliar – the uncharted and only vaguely visible territory of the future toward which we are hurtling. ... -
Potential Is Origin in Religious Transhumanism
This is a transcript of a sermon I gave at the Unitarian Universalist Society of South Valley in Salt Lake City this morning. My friend and fellow religious Transhumanist, Jordan Roberts, invited me to speak on religious Transhumanism and the New God Argument. The congregation was friendly, the music and ... -
Technological Evolution and Postsecular Religion
Humanity is engaged in epochal change, an accelerating technological and cultural evolution with unprecedented risks and opportunities. Among the possibilities is that of creating new tools, processes, and organizations that together serve as infrastructure for helping everyone restore the vitality of their bodies and minds, and improve their capacity to ... -
Letter to a Seminary Teacher on Human Evolution
Dear brother, I’m the father of one of your seminary students. He mentioned to me that a student asked about human evolution yesterday, and that you do not have a favorable opinion of it. I’m writing to share with you my thoughts and feelings on the subject, hoping that you’ll ... -
Evolving Gods and Richard Dawkins
As mentioned before, I’ve repeatedly found inspiration in Richard Dawkins, despite an important difference between us. He’s a devout atheist. And I’m a devout theist. He argues cogently that complex life must have simpler antecedents. And he vigorously attacks contrary theist positions. I agree with him. Interestingly, however, to illustrate ... -
A Mormon View of the Judeo-Christian Creation Story
I recently read news of a creationist museum using billboards featuring cartoon dinosaurs. Yes. That’s religious dinosaurs using cartoon dinosaurs to preach fictional dinosaurs. It prompted an interesting discussion on my Google+ page regarding interpretation of the Judeo-Christian creation story. The claim was made that the LDS Church (the largest ... -
Living in an undecidable halting problem of evil?
For some computer programs, we can know in advance how they will run, when they will stop, and what results they will return. However, there are other computer programs that are undecidable halting problems: we cannot know, without actually running them, whether they will ever stop running, let alone what ... -
What is Transhumanism?
Some people don’t like ideological labels. They don’t like their perspectives being categorized, for whatever reason, good or bad. I’m not one of them. I’m comfortable with labels. And I don’t mind being categorized. Of course, it’s a mistake to think any label perfectly describes my perspectives or those of ... -
The Big Bang from Posthuman Computers in Black Holes?
A friend asked for my opinion on what came before the big bang. I’m not a physicist or cosmologist, but I read enough to have (dangerous) opinions that might provoke imagination in productive directions. With that disclaimer, here are my thoughts. First, maybe there wasn’t a big bang. Clearly, scientific ... -
Posthuman Evolution Recapped Human Growth?
A Wired article recently explained “Human Evolution Recapped in Kids’ Brain Growth.” Basically, the idea is that 25 million years’ of human brain evolution are repeated at relatively high speed in the developing brains of contemporary human children. I’ve sometimes wondered whether something similar might not be true of posthuman ... -
Looking for God in the Wrong Places
I recently came across an interesting blog post entitled “An Alien God,” by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is a transhumanist AI researcher. In the post, Eliezer describes biological evolution and compares it to various ideas of God. In the end, he concludes that evolution is much more like Azathoth, a blind ... -
The Universe IS the Neohuman
I’ve mentioned before, but want to make more explicit here, the idea that there seems to be no reason to distinguish between a computed world and the neohuman (or posthuman) computing it. As the Simulation Argument goes, if ever we create a significant number of computed worlds then we are ...