The Mormon Transhumanist Association is pleased to announce that next year’s annual conference will take place on Saturday, 9 April 2016 at the Salt Lake City Public Library.

The transhumanist keynote speaker will be Eric Steinhart, author of Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death and professor in the Department of Philosophy at William Paterson University. Eric holds degrees in computer science and philosophy and has previously worked as a software engineer. He has written extensively on Nietzsche, metaphor, computing, technology, and religion. Our Mormon keynote speaker will be announced later.

MTA invites you to submit papers for the conference. The aim of this conference is to address the many issues and topics that lie at the intersection of technology and religion, and their impacts on society, and culture including art, music, entertainment, and on society in general. Contributions need not focus only on specifically Mormon religious issues. Papers should be approximately two to seven pages in length and should include full citations, references, footnotes, etc. Presenters are encouraged to make use of multimedia aids, such as slides, to make their presentations more engaging. Potential conference topics include:

Philosophy, Theology and the Sociology of Religion: The secularization hypothesis and its implications for religion and religious organizations; post-secularization; ethics; faith and rationality; religious anthropology; philosophy of religion; scriptural hermeneutics; demythologization; post-modern religion; religious naturalism; social anthropology of technology; sociology of technology; technology and spirituality; feminism and gender issues; technology and gender.

Transhumanism: Transhuman-ism and trans-humanism; evolution and the great filter argument; Moore’s law, Kurzweil’s law and the technological singularity; the pace of technological change; evolution; the evolution of technology; simulation argument; solar energy; genome sequencing; synthetic biology; 3D printing; genetics and biotech; nanotech and molecular machines; robotics and artificial intelligence; substrate independent minds; mind uploading; consciousness; cultural impact of technology; coping with the pace of technological change; neuroscience

Transfigurism: rejecting fundamentalism; rejecting anti-religiosity; transfigurist science; transfigurist politics; transfigurist art; promoting benevolence; promoting creativity; engineering transfiguration; engineering resurrection; engineering renewal of this world; engineering worlds without end; the New God Argument

Please send submissions in RTF, PDF, MS Word or Google Doc format to admin@transfigurism.org. Include author’s full name, contact information, and title.

Some funding is available to reimburse portions of travel for presenters. Please indicate interest in being considered for travel support in the submission email.

For more information, visit the official website of the Mormon Transhumanist Association at transfigurism.org. Recordings of presentations from previous years are available on our YouTube channel.

Important dates
Conference Paper Submission Deadline: February 1, 2016
Presentation Invitation Notification Date: March 1, 2016
Conference Date: April 9, 2016

original announcement is HERE