Posthumanism or post-humanism is a term with at least seven definitions according to philosopher Francesca Ferrando:
- Antihumanism: any theory that is critical of traditional humanism and traditional ideas about humanity and the human condition.
- Cultural posthumanism: a branch of cultural theory critical of the foundational assumptions of humanism and its legacy that examines and questions the historical notions of "human" and "human nature", often challenging typical notions of human subjectivity and embodiment and strives to move beyond archaic concepts of "human nature" to develop ones which constantly adapt to contemporary technoscientific knowledge.
- Philosophical posthumanism: a philosophical direction which draws on cultural posthumanism, the philosophical strand examines the ethical implications of expanding the circle of moral concern and extending subjectivities beyond the human species.
- Posthuman condition: the deconstruction of the human condition by critical theorists.
- Transhumanism: an ideology and movement which seeks to develop and make available technologies that eliminate aging and greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities, in order to achieve a "posthuman future".
- AI takeover: A more pessimistic alternative to transhumanism in which humans will not be enhanced, but rather eventually replaced by artificial intelligences. Some philosophers, including Nick Land, promote the view that humans should embrace and accept their eventual demise. This is related to the view of "cosmism", which supports the building of strong artificial intelligence even if it may entail the end of humanity, as in their view it "would be a cosmic tragedy if humanity freezes evolution at the puny human level".
- Voluntary Human Extinction, which seeks a "posthuman future" that in this case is a future without humans.
Financial capital is any economic resource measured in terms of money used by entrepreneurs and businesses to buy what they need to make their products or to provide their services to the sector of the economy upon which their operation is based, i.e. retail, corporate, investment banking, etc.
The concept of the supernatural encompasses anything that is inexplicable by scientific understanding of the laws of nature but nevertheless argued by believers to exist. Examples include immaterial beings such as angels, gods and spirits, and claimed human abilities like magic, telekinesis and extrasensory perception.
A phenomenon is any thing which manifests itself. Phenomena are often, but not always, understood as "things that appear" or "experiences" for a sentient being, or in principle may be so.
Superhuman qualities are qualities that exceed those found in humans.
A humanoid is something that has an appearance resembling a human without actually being one. The earliest recorded use of the term, in 1870, referred to indigenous peoples in areas colonized by Europeans. By the 20th century, the term came to describe fossils which were morphologically similar, but not identical, to those of the human skeleton.
Grey aliens, also referred to as Zeta Reticulans, Roswell Greys, or Grays, are purported extraterrestrial beings whose existence is discussed in ufological, paranormal, and New Age communities and who are named for their unique skin color. Forty-three percent of all reported alien encounters in the United States describe Grey aliens. Such claims vary in every respect, including the nature, origins, moral dispositions, intentions, and physical appearances of the encountered beings, though many of them nonetheless share some noticeable similarities. A composite description derived from this overlap would have Greys as small-bodied beings with smooth grey-colored skin, enlarged hairless heads and large black eyes.
Tathāgata is a Pali and Sanskrit word; Gautama Buddha uses it when referring to himself in the Pāli Canon. The term is often thought to mean either "one who has thus gone" (tathā-gata) or "one who has thus come" (tathā-āgata). This is interpreted as signifying that the Tathāgata is beyond all coming and going – beyond all transitory phenomena. There are, however, other interpretations and the precise original meaning of the word is not certain.
The terms alien abduction or abduction phenomenon describe "subjectively real memories of being taken secretly unwillingly by apparently unhuman figures (aliens) and subjected to complex physical and psychological procedures". People claiming to have been abducted are usually called "abductees" or "experiencers". Typical claims involve being subjected to forced medical examinations that emphasize abductee reproductive systems. Abductees sometimes claim to have been warned against environmental abuse and the dangers of nuclear weapons.
A medical sign is an objective indication of some medical fact or characteristic that may be detected by a patient or anyone, especially a physician, before or during a physical examination of a patient. For example, whereas a tingling paresthesia is a symptom, erythema is a sign. Symptoms and signs are often nonspecific, but often combinations of them are at least suggestive of certain diagnoses, helping to narrow down what may be wrong. In other cases they are specific even to the point of being pathognomonic.
In the multi-authored online science fiction world-building project Orion's Arm Universe, an Archailect is an ascended post-singularity intelligence that has grown vastly beyond even the Transapient level. Within the context of this hypothetical universe, they represent the highest level of known living beings, in terms of both thinking power and aggregate energy/mass.
In mathematics, a Bézout domain is a form of a Prüfer domain. It is an integral domain in which the sum of two principal ideals is again a principal ideal. This means that for every pair of elements a Bézout identity holds, and that every finitely generated ideal is principal. Any principal ideal domain (PID) is a Bézout domain, but a Bézout domain need not be a Noetherian ring, so it could have non-finitely generated ideals ; if so, it is not a unique factorization domain (UFD), but still is a GCD domain. The theory of Bézout domains retains many of the properties of PIDs, without requiring the Noetherian property. Bézout domains are named after the French mathematician Étienne Bézout.
The four stages of enlightenment in Theravada and Early Buddhism are the four progressive stages culminating in full enlightenment as an Arahant.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to humanism:
The narrative of the abduction phenomenon is an alleged core of similarity in contents and chronology underlying various claims of forced temporary abduction of humans by apparently otherworldly beings. Proponents of the abduction phenomenon contend that this similarity is evidence of the veracity of the phenomenon as an objective reality, although this belief is disregarded by most scientists, who regard alien abduction as a purely psychological and cultural phenomenon.
Posthumanization comprises "those processes by which a society comes to include members other than 'natural' biological human beings who, in one way or another, contribute to the structures, dynamics, or meaning of the society." Posthumanization is one of the key phenomena studied by those academic disciplines and methodologies that identify themselves as "posthumanist", including critical, cultural, and philosophical posthumanism. Its processes can be divided into forms of non-technological and technological posthumanization.
