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A hypothetical being whose central capacities exceed the human maximum, and, in a separate scholarly tradition, a critique of the humanist subject itself.
Posthuman names a being whose general capacities exceed the maximum attainable by any current human, to a degree that would put it outside the category "human" as that category is currently used. The word carries a second, largely unrelated meaning in the humanities, where posthumanism is a critique of the humanist picture of the self-contained rational subject rather than a forecast about future beings. The two usages share a prefix and almost nothing else, and the resulting confusion is a persistent feature of the literature.
In transhumanist writing the two terms mark positions on a continuum. A transhuman is a person in transition: someone using enhancement technologies but still recognisably a member of the species. A posthuman lies beyond that, past whatever threshold makes the species label stop applying. FM-2030 introduced the transitional sense in the 1970s, describing transhumans as evolutionary intermediaries identifiable by their reproductive choices, prostheses, mobility and rejection of traditional social forms.
The difficulty is that nobody has specified where the threshold sits, and most attempts to place it collapse under examination. A person with a Cochlear implant and a pacemaker who lives to 110 is not posthuman on anyone's account. A brain emulation running at a thousand times biological speed would be on almost everyone's. Between those poles the concept provides no principled cut, which is why careful writers treat "posthuman" as a direction rather than a status.
The most-cited technical definition is Nick Bostrom's. A posthuman capacity is a general central capacity greatly exceeding the maximum attainable by any current human without recourse to new technological means; a posthuman is a being with at least one such capacity.1 Bostrom names three central capacities: healthspan, the capacity to remain fully healthy and active; cognition, general intellectual capacities including memory and abstract reasoning; and emotion, the capacity to enjoy life and to respond appropriately to people and situations.
Three features of this definition do real work. It is capacity-based, so it says nothing about what a posthuman is made of; a biologically modified human, an emulation, and an engineered organism could all qualify. It is disjunctive, requiring only one capacity to cross the line, which is why radical life extension alone would count. And it is comparative to the current maximum, not to the average, which sets a high bar: a drug that lifts a typical person to the level of an unusually healthy one is enhancement, not posthumanity.
Terminology"Posthuman" and "posthumanism" are not the same word with different endings. Posthuman is a noun for a possible being; posthumanism is an intellectual position about the concept of the human. A scholar can be a posthumanist and regard posthumans as a naive fantasy, and many are.
The definition also deliberately avoids the question of moral status. Bostrom's essay is a reply to the charge that posthuman existence would be undesirable or unintelligible, and argues that healthspan, cognition and emotion are goods whose extreme versions people already recognise as valuable when they encounter unusually healthy, clever or emotionally resilient people. The argument concerns desirability, not feasibility, and Bostrom is explicit that it establishes nothing about whether such beings can be built.
The humanities tradition begins from a different question: not what comes after humans, but what was wrong with the concept of the human in the first place. Ihab Hassan's 1977 essay put the question in circulation; Donna Haraway's cyborg gave it a figure.2 The target is the humanist subject inherited from the Enlightenment — autonomous, disembodied in its reasoning, implicitly male, European and able-bodied — and the boundaries it maintains against animals, machines and the environment.
N. Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman is the pivotal text for this wiki's subject matter because it is directly about the ideas covered here.3 Hayles traces how mid-century cybernetics came to treat information as a pattern that could be abstracted from any particular material carrier, and argues that this move — not any technology — is what created the posthuman imaginary. Her objection to Mind uploading is not that the engineering is hard but that the premise of Substrate independence smuggles in a fantasy of escape from the body which the science does not support. She ends the book arguing for a posthuman that recognises embodiment as constitutive rather than incidental.
Cary Wolfe pushes the point further, arguing that transhumanism is not a break with humanism but its intensification: it takes the humanist ideals of autonomy, mastery and rational self-improvement and proposes to achieve them more completely.4 Rosi Braidotti's version shifts the emphasis to anti-anthropocentrism, extending moral consideration across species and questioning why human flourishing should be the organising value at all.
The traditions rarely engage. Transhumanist writing on posthumanity is largely analytic philosophy and applied futurism, concerned with capacities, probabilities and ethical permissibility. Critical posthumanism is largely continental theory, concerned with subject formation, representation and power. Each occasionally treats the other as a straw man: the first reads the second as wordplay, the second reads the first as Californian ideology with a philosophy department attached.
A third usage confuses matters further. Francis Fukuyama's Our Posthuman Future uses "posthuman" pejoratively, to name the outcome bioconservatives fear: a world in which biotechnology has dissolved the shared human nature he takes to ground equal political rights.5 That argument is set out in Bioconservatism, and it borrows the transhumanist sense of the word while reversing its valence.
Is the posthuman a threshold or a direction?Bostrom's definition implies a crossing point, since a capacity either exceeds the current human maximum or does not. Critics inside transhumanism note that capacities are continuous and technology-relative: literacy, spectacles and antibiotics have all raised human maxima, so the reference class keeps moving and the threshold recedes as it is approached.
The definitional objection is that "greatly exceeding" is unquantified and does no work. A being that lives to 200 and one that lives to 20,000 both satisfy it, though almost nothing else about them is comparable.
The empirical objection is that no central capacity has yet been pushed past the human maximum by any technology. Assistive devices restore function; Nootropics produce small and inconsistent effects in healthy adults; Genetic enhancement of cognition is limited by the polygenic architecture of the traits involved; brain–computer interfaces currently return a fraction of natural capability to people who have lost it. Every proposed route to posthumanity is at an earlier stage than its advocates' timelines assume, and this wiki's per-article readiness assessments reflect that gap.
The identity objection asks whether the posthuman would be the same person as the human who became one — the problem treated in Personal identity and continuity. Gradual modification looks survivable on most theories; a single discontinuous transformation does not.
The political objection, made from both the left and the disability-rights tradition, is that positing a superior future being encodes a judgement about present ones. If a posthuman is defined by capacities, then existing people are ranked by how far short they fall, a structure examined in Disability rights and enhancement and one reason Morphological freedom is framed as a right to self-modification rather than an obligation to improve.
No agreed criterion exists for recognising a posthuman if one appeared, and the candidates are not converging. A capacity threshold makes the category depend on a moving human maximum. A substrate criterion excludes biologically enhanced humans and includes any sufficiently capable machine, which collapses the term into Artificial general intelligence. A phenomenological criterion would require settling the questions raised in Machine consciousness, which remain open. The unresolved issue is whether "posthuman" picks out a natural kind at all, or whether it functions as a placeholder for whatever lies past the current limits of imagination about human capability — a placeholder that each generation refills with the technologies it happens to have.
bookBostrom, N. "Why I Want to Be a Posthuman When I Grow Up." In Gordijn, B. and Chadwick, R. (eds), Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity. Springer, 2008.↩An argument that posthuman existence would be desirable and worth wanting, not a claim that it is achievable.
paperHaraway, D. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s." Socialist Review, 1985.↩A political essay using the cyborg as a figure for broken boundaries; it is not a claim about human-machine hybrids as engineering.
bookHayles, N. K. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999. ↩
bookWolfe, C. What Is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press, 2010. ↩
bookFukuyama, F. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. ↩