Posthuman Future, an illustration by Michael Gibbs for The Chronicle of Higher Education's look at how biotechnology will change the human experience, has become one of the secular icons representing a posthuman.

A posthuman or post-human is, according to transhumanist intellectuals, a hypothetical future being "whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards."^[1] This article or section is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... Image File history File links Posthuman_Future. ... Image File history File links Posthuman_Future. ... The structure of insulin Biotechnology is technology based on biology, especially when used in agriculture, food science, and medicine. ... For other uses, see Human nature (disambiguation). ... American cultural icons. ... Transhumanism is an emergent school of speculative philosophy analysing or favouring the use of science and technology, especially neurotechnology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology, to overcome human limitations and improve the human condition. ... This article is about modern humans. ...

The difference between the posthuman and other hypothetical sophisticated non-humans is that a posthuman was once a human, either in its lifetime or in the lifetimes of some or all of its direct ancestors. As such, a prerequisite for a posthuman is a transhuman, the point at which the human being begins surpassing his own limitations, but is still recognisable as a human person or similar.^[1] Transhuman is a term that refers to an intermediary form between the human and the posthuman. ...

Posthumans could be a symbiosis of human and artificial intelligence, or uploaded consciousnesses, or the result of making many smaller but cumulatively profound technological augmentations to a biological human, i.e. a cyborg. Some examples of the latter are redesigning the human organism using advanced nanotechnology or radical enhancement using some combination of technologies such as genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, life extension therapies, neural interfaces, advanced information management tools, memory enhancing drugs, wearable or implanted computers, and cognitive techniques.^[1] AI redirects here. ... In transhumanism and science fiction, mind uploading (also occasionally referred to by other terms such as mind downloading, mind transfer, whole brain emulation, whole body emulation, or electronic transcendence) refers to the hypothetical transfer of a human mind to an artificial substrate, such as a detailed computer simulation of an... For other uses, see Cyborg (disambiguation). ... Molecular nanotechnology (MNT) is the concept of engineering functional mechanical systems at the molecular scale. ... Human genetic engineering refers to the controlled modification of the human genome, which is the genome of Homo Sapiens composed of 23 pairs of chromosomes with a total of approximately 3 billion DNA base pairs containing an estimated 30,000 genes. ... Psychopharmacology is the study of the effects of any psychoactive drug that acts upon the mind by affecting brain chemistry. ... Life extension refers to an increase in maximum or average lifespan, especially in humans, by slowing down or reversing the processes of aging. ... // A brain-computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a direct neural interface or a brain-machine interface, is a direct communication pathway between a human or animal brain (or brain cell culture) and an external device. ... Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the internet. ... Nootropics, popularly referred to as smart drugs, smart nutrients, cognitive enhancers and brain enhancers, are substances which claim to boost human cognitive abilities (the functions and capacities of the brain). ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Cognitive science is usually defined as the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence (e. ...

A variation on the posthuman theme is the notion of the "Posthuman God"; the idea that posthumans, being no longer confined to the parameters of "humanness", might grow physically and mentally so powerful as to appear possibly god-like by human standards. This notion should not be interpreted as being related to the idea portrayed in some soft science fiction that a sufficiently advanced species may "ascend" to a superior plane of existence - rather, it merely means that some posthuman being may become so exceedingly intelligent and technologically sophisticated that its behaviour would not possibly be comprehensible to modern humans, purely by reason of their limited intelligence and imagination. Similar to this theory is the belief or aspiration that humans will create a God entity, emerging from an artificial intelligence. ... For other uses, see Human nature (disambiguation). ... Soft science fiction, or soft SF, like its complementary opposite hard science fiction, is a descriptive term that points to the role and nature of the science content in a science fiction story. ... Daniel Jackson and a Zen Monk meditate on the complexities of Ascension. ... Parallel universe or alternate reality in science fiction and fantasy is a self-contained separate reality coexisting with our own. ...

At what point does a human become posthuman? Steven Pinker, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of How the Mind Works, poses the following hypothetical, which is an example of the Ship of Theseus paradox: Steven Pinker Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a prominent Canadian-born American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and popular science writer known for his spirited and wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. ... Cognitive neuroscience is an academic field concerned with the scientific study of biological mechanisms underlying cognition, with a specific focus on the neural substrates of mental processes and their behavioral manifestations. ... How the Mind Works is a book by American cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, published in 1996. ... The Ship of Theseus is a paradox also known as Theseus paradox. ...

Surgeons replace one of your neurons with a microchip that duplicates its input-output functions. You feel and behave exactly as before. Then they replace a second one, and a third one, and so on, until more and more of your brain becomes silicon. Since each microchip does exactly what the neuron did, your behavior and memory never change. Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like dying? Is some other conscious entity moving in with you?^[2]

As used in this article, "posthuman" does not refer to a conjectured future where humans are extinct or otherwise absent from the Earth. As with other species who speciate from one another, both humans and posthumans could continue to exist. However, this does appear to be a possible viewpoint among a minority of transhumanists such as Marvin Minsky and Hans Moravec, who could be considered misanthropes, at least in regards to humanity in its current state. Human extinction would be the extinction of the human species, Homo sapiens. ... Charles Darwins first sketch of an evolutionary tree from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species (1837) Speciation is the evolutionary process by which new biological species arise. ... Marvin Lee Minsky (born August 9, 1927), sometimes affectionately known as Old Man Minsky, is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of MITs AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy. ... Hans Moravec (born November 30, 1948 in Austria) is a research professor at the Robotics Institute (Carnegie Mellon) of Carnegie Mellon University. ... Misanthropy is a general dislike of the human race. ...

References

The World Transhumanist Association is an international non-profit membership organisation which advocates the ethical use of technology to enhance human capacities. ... Year 2006 (MMVI) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 239th day of the year (240th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ...

External links

• Babin, Dominique (2004). PH1. Manuel d'usage et d'entretien du post-humain. Flammarion. (review in The Future Fire 1)
• Bostrom, Nick.(2005) In Defence of Posthuman Dignity, Bioethics, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 202-214.
• Dixon, Dougal (1990). Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future.
• Elhefnawy, Nader (2007) Nikolai Fedorov and the Dawn of the Posthuman in The Future Fire 9
• Nedkova, Iliyana; Byrne, Chris. (2004) Designer Bodies: Towards the Posthuman Condition, Art Research Communication
• Pepperell, Robert (1995). The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness beyond the brain