Monism
Monism is the metaphysical position that everything that exists is made of one kind of thing or expresses one underlying reality. It rejects the division, drawn most influentially by René Descartes, between an extended physical world and an unextended thinking mind. The word comes from the Greek monos, meaning “single” or “alone,” and entered philosophical vocabulary through the eighteenth-century German philosopher Christian Wolff, who used it for views that decline to split reality into two fundamental kinds.
All spirit is matter
Joseph Smith took an unusually direct position on this question. In 1843 he taught: “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; we cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter” (D&C 131:7–8). Spirit, on this account, differs from ordinary matter in degree. It belongs to the same universe and may one day be observed by better instruments, whether those are purified bodies or improved technologies. Early Latter-day Saint writers pursued the idea further. Parley P. Pratt described spirit as a subtle, intelligent fluid diffused through space, and Orson Pratt speculated about eternal particles endowed with intelligence.
The consequences for religious life are considerable. If spirit and element share one nature, the line between sacred and secular becomes a matter of use and orientation. The Lord tells Joseph that “all things unto me are spiritual, and not at any time have I given unto you a law which was temporal” (D&C 29:34). Another revelation teaches that “spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy” (D&C 93:33). Salvation in this framework includes the body and the physical world, and scientific knowledge about matter is knowledge about the same reality theology addresses.
Divine immanence
Restoration scripture also places God’s influence within the cosmos. The Light of Christ proceeds “from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space”; it is “the light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things, which is the law by which all things are governed” (D&C 88:12–13). Read with D&C 131, this passage describes divine action working through the order of nature. In such a cosmology a miracle is the use of laws we do not yet understand by beings who do.
The same continuity extends to God. Joseph Smith taught that “the Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s” (D&C 130:22). An embodied God who acts through a light that fills space and governs all things stands within the universe as its most advanced inhabitant. Lincoln Cannon and other Mormon Transhumanists have drawn on this picture to argue that the difference between humanity and God is one of development, which leaves room for human beings to grow toward divine capacities through both grace and effort.
Mind, substrate, and information
Contemporary philosophy and physics offer several forms of monism that bear on transhumanist questions. Digital physics, associated with Konrad Zuse, Edward Fredkin, and John Wheeler’s phrase “it from bit,” proposes that physical reality is fundamentally a process of computation. Panpsychist views, defended today by philosophers such as Philip Goff, hold that some form of experience is present in matter at every scale. Giulio Tononi’s integrated information theory tries to measure consciousness as a property of how a physical system processes information.
These proposals differ in important ways, yet each treats mind as part of the physical world. That shared commitment supports the transhumanist idea of substrate independence: if a mind is a pattern realized in matter, the same pattern might be realized in other materials, whether a repaired biological brain, an engineered one, or a computational system. Mind uploading and artificial general intelligence remain unsolved problems. Monism makes them questions of engineering and physics, open to investigation.
The same reasoning applies to resurrection. Latter-day Saint teaching holds that the resurrected body is physical, tangible, and perfected. Within a monistic cosmology, resurrection is the fullest application of natural law to the restoration of persons. Mormon Transhumanists hold that God works through such means and invites human beings to learn them, so that medicine, regenerative science, and the preservation of identity can take part in the same work.
The transfigurist imperative
Monism removes the wall that has long separated theology from science. If spirit is refined matter and divine power operates through law, then sanctification, embodiment, and technological transformation are aspects of one process in one universe. For Mormon Transhumanists this unity carries an obligation: to study the physical world as carefully as the scriptures, and to treat the growth of human capacity as part of becoming like God.