From Liberty Jail to Priesthood Sealing Power

Lincoln Cannon is an American philosopher and technologist who co-founded the Mormon Transhumanist Association in 2006, serving as its president from 2006 to 2016. He is a leading advocate of technological evolution and postsecular religion, combining software engineering expertise with degrees in philosophy and business. ¶ Cannon is also a founder and board member of the Christian Transhumanist Association. He formulated the New God Argument, a logical argument for faith in God that has become popular among religious transhumanists. His academic work includes “Mormonism Mandates Transhumanism” published in Religion and Human Enhancement: Death, Values, and Morality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and “Transfigurism: A Future of Religion as Exemplified by Religious Transhumanists” published in The Transhumanism Handbook (Springer Verlag, 2019). ¶ Mormon transhumanism, as articulated by Cannon, holds that humanity should learn how to be compassionate creators. This idea is central to the Mormon theological tradition, which provides a religious framework consistent with naturalism and supportive of human transformation. Cannon’s work bridges religious faith with scientific advancement, advocating for the ethical use of technology to extend human abilities in ways consistent with a religious worldview.
Sealing Power
Joseph Smith taught that enduring power emerges naturally, not from force, but from the influence of relationships that we develop together through knowledge, consent, compassion, and persuasion. Such virtues form the underlying relational physics that make social power, and its technical applications, enduring. They describe not only how Joseph envisioned God exercising power, but how any entity must operate to maintain enduring power in a decentralized context. Nothing compulsory persists at the limits of time because compulsion destroys the very relationships on which such power depends.
