Extropy/Extropian

Extropy names whatever in a living or social system works against the running down of the world, and Max More defined it in 1998 as “the extent of a system’s intelligence, information, order, vitality, and capacity for improvement.” Extropians are those who seek to increase it. The founders of the magazine Extropy coined the word in 1988 as the counterpart of entropy, which Rudolf Clausius had named in 1865 from the Greek tropē, “a turning” or “transformation.” That Greek noun appears once in the New Testament, where James describes “the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning” (James 1:17). Lexicons explain the turning as the course of the heavenly bodies, a course from which James exempts their Maker.

More’s principles of 1998 cast religious faith as the adversary of progress. “Faith in a better future,” he wrote, “is confidence that an external force, whether God, State, or even extraterrestrials, will solve our problems,” and such faith “breeds passivity by promising progress as a gift bestowed on us by superior forces.” Many believers return the suspicion, hearing in the extropian program the presumption of creatures who would abolish every limit set upon them. Restoration scripture complicates both judgments. It shares the extropian hope of unending increase, while grounding that hope in an unchanging God, in an agency conferred through redemption, and in a covenant community. Its account begins where Clausius began, with the decay of the created order.

Decay and the Father of Lights

A psalm of affliction sets the perishing creation against its Creator: “Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: and the heavens are the work of thy hands. They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment,” and then, “But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end” (Psalm 102:25-27). Hebrew poetry thus anticipates the contrast James would draw with tropē, and the Epistle to the Hebrews applies the same psalm to the Son. The word Clausius chose for the running down of the physical world is therefore the word scripture uses for the change that God does not undergo.

Paul answers the psalm with a hope for the material creation itself. The creation “was made subject to vanity,” he writes, and it groans and travails while it waits “for the manifestation of the sons of God,” because “the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:19-21). The Greek phthora, “corruption,” means decay, and Paul’s deliverance from it is cosmic in scope. Within the framework of the Restoration, which holds matter to be eternal and the earth destined for renewal, the passage gives the children of God a share in that deliverance, a reading congenial to the Mormon transhumanist hope that human labor may assist in renewing the earth.

The Agency of the Redeemed

More’s charge supposes that faith receives progress as a gift and therefore waits for it, yet Lehi, instructing his son Jacob, describes the gift of redemption as a bestowal of initiative. Because the Messiah comes “to redeem the children of men from the fall,” Lehi teaches, “they have become free forever, knowing good from evil; to act for themselves and not to be acted upon” (2 Nephi 2:26). The gift Lehi describes is the capacity to act, and it obliges its recipients to exercise that capacity. In this connection, the Restoration’s doctrine of agency answers the extropian objection from within scripture, since the redeemed are freed for initiative and accountable for its use.

Nephi condemns the same passivity, though in the domain of revelation. “I will give unto the children of men line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little,” the Lord declares, “for unto him that receiveth I will give more; and from them that shall say, We have enough, from them shall be taken away even that which they have” (2 Nephi 28:30). The verse sets out a law of increase in which receptivity enlarges capacity and complacency forfeits it. Joseph Smith’s teaching of eternal progression extends that law without a fixed ceiling, and at this point the Restoration and the extropian principle of perpetual progress plainly converge.

Self-Direction and Hearts Knit Together

The extropian principle of self-direction called for “independent thinking, individual freedom, personal responsibility, self-direction, self-esteem, and respect for others.” Alma’s converts at the waters of Mormon covenanted to a different arrangement of the same goods. They were to “look forward with one eye, having one faith and one baptism, having their hearts knit together in unity and in love one towards another” (Mosiah 18:21), and they promised to bear one another’s burdens. Agency remained theirs, yet it was exercised inside a covenant that made each member responsible for the others. The Mormon Transhumanist Association hosted More at its 2010 conference, and its Affirmation seeks the exaltation of “communities and their environments” along with individuals.

The extropian movement has since drawn sharp criticism. Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres include extropianism in the cluster of ideologies they call TESCREAL, and they argue that the cluster carries forward the aspirations of twentieth-century eugenics under the banner of artificial intelligence. Defenders reply that the label collapses distinct movements into one. The Extropy Institute itself closed in 2006, its board judging its mission essentially completed, and its ideas passed into wider transhumanism. Whatever the merits of the indictment, it identifies a genuine hazard in self-direction pursued without covenant, since enhancement chosen by the capable alone tends to leave the less capable behind.

Order and Its Exported Cost

Erwin Schrödinger observed in 1944 that a living organism maintains its internal order by drawing order from its surroundings and returning disorder to them, and the same accounting governs cities, industries, and data centers. The International Energy Agency estimates that data centers consumed about 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, roughly one and a half percent of global use, and projects that demand will more than double by 2030. Gains in machine intelligence are purchased with heat, water, and waste released into a shared environment, and a laboratory may raise its own extropy while exporting entropy to neighbors who receive none of the benefit. Thermodynamics thus names a second hazard beside the one the critics identified.

Max More’s self-directed extropian and Alma’s covenanters at the waters of Mormon both seek increase and refuse the passive faith that waits for progress to arrive. They differ in the unit of increase. The extropian measures intelligence, order, and vitality within a system, while Alma’s people measured them across a community whose hearts were knit together and whose burdens were shared. Mormon transhumanists share the extropian aims of longer lives and greater minds, and they inherit from scripture a God who does not decay, an agency conferred by redemption, and a creation awaiting deliverance. In that light the extropy worth seeking is measured across the whole community, including the neighbors who absorb a system’s heat and waste.