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Ethics of Science and Technology Assessment 49
Pablo López-Silva
Luca Valera Editors
Protecting
the Mind
Challenges in Law, Neuroprotection,
and Neurorights
Ethics of Science and Technology Assessment
Volume 49
Series Editors
Carl Friedrich Gethmann, Universität Siegen, Siegen, Nordrhein-Westfalen,
Germany
Michael Quante, Philosophisches Seminar, Westfälische Wilhelms Universität,
Münster, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Bjoern Niehaves, Universitaet Siegen, Siegen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Holger Schönherr, Department of Chemistry and Biology, Universität Siegen,
Siegen, Germany
The series Ethics of Science and Technology Assessment focuses on the impact that
scientific and technological advances have on individuals, their social lives, and on
the natural environment. Its goal is to cover the field of Science and Technologies
Studies (STS), without being limited to it. The series welcomes scientific and philo-
sophical reviews on questions, consequences and challenges entailed by the nature
and practices of science and technology, as well as original essays on the impact
and role of scientific advances, technological research and research ethics. Volumes
published in the series include monographs and edited books based on the results of
interdisciplinary research projects. Books that are devoted to supporting education
at the graduate and post-graduate levels are especially welcome.
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse
of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
v
vi Contents
Luca Valera is Associate Professor at the Center for Bioethics (School of Medicine),
Pontificia Universidad Católica de, Chile. Moreover, he is Visiting Professor at
the Department of Philosophy, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain. He is Ph.D. in
Bioethics at Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Italy. His areas of research
are Environmental Ethics, Philosophy of Technology, Bioethics, and Applied Ethics.
Contributors
vii
viii Editors and Contributors
ix
Chapter 1
Towards an Ethical Discussion
of Neurotechnological Progress
Abstract Over the last years, neurotechnological progress has motivated a number
of theoretical and practical worries. For example, the potential misuses of neurode-
vices with direct access to our neural data in real time might pose a number of
threats to our autonomy, free-will, agency, privacy, and liberty. In light of this—
not so distant—scenario, cooperative interdisciplinary reflection is needed in order
to inform conceptual, legal, and ethical challenges that arise from the way in which
neurotechnological progress impacts our understanding of issues such as technology,
society, the human mind, and finally, the very concept of the human person.
P. López-Silva (B)
School of Psychology, Universidad de Valparaíso, Hontaneda 2653, Valparaiso, Chile
L. Valera
Centre for Bioethics, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Av. L. Bernardo O’Higgins 340,
Santiago de Chile, Chile
Department of Philosophy, Universidad de Valladolid, Plaza Campus Universitario, Valladolid,
Spain
issue becomes highly problematic in light of the current lack of explicit international
regulatory laws for the potential production of such neurotechnological applica-
tions (Ienca and Haselager 2016; Ienca and Andorno 2017; López-Silva and Madrid
2021). This scenario becomes even more complicated if we think that this type of
neurotechnologies might allow the development of the unprecedented ability to read
minds by decoding, analyzing, and interpreting data about neural activity patterns of
human brains, exposing what once was thought to be private, namely, our thoughts,
beliefs, desires, and (cognitive and behavioural) predispositions. More importantly,
the very possibility of recording with such a precision the neural activity that produce
specific mental states might offer scientists and governments the possibility of not
only reading, but also controlling the production of mental states in the minds of
regular citizens, process that has been called “brain-hacking” (Yuste 2019, 2020a,
b).
In this context, a number of researchers all over the world have claimed that
current ethical and legislative frameworks are not ready to deal with some of the
potential situations imposed by these neurotechnological advances and that, there-
fore, the development of neuroprotective legal frameworks should become a global
urgent priority (Yuste et al. 2021). Certainly, the contexts in which all these prac-
tical and philosophical concerns arise are complex and invite us to reconsider—
from an interdisciplinary point of view—fundamental questions about the ethics of
neurotechnologies, the concept of science and its relationship with the notion of the
mental, and issues about the anthropological model that guides current neuroethical
debates. More specifically, the potential misuses of neurotechnologies with access
to neural data also invites a re-evaluation of several traditional ethical, political,
and philosophical categories. Here, there is a pushing need for developing clear and
well-informed ideas from an interdisciplinary view. Without this approach, we will be
unable to evaluate and inform the best actions to be taken for both current and future
generations. Only by developing conceptually consistent tools, we will be able to
responsibly inform decision and policy-making within these more practical contexts.
Consequently, the progress in the neuroethical field may also contribute to building a
framework to develop a better and safer neurotechnological (and neuro-engineering)
practice.
Taking this need into consideration, Protecting the Mind: Challenges in law,
neuroprotection, and neurorights aims at exploring some of the most fundamental
debates emerging from the analysis of the philosophical, social, ethical, and legal
consequences of current advances in neurosciences and neurotechnology. The afore-
mentioned scenarios make necessary the construction of an academic forum aiming
at defining and re-defining some of the most fundamental concepts in the field
to deal in an informed manner with the challenges of the growing influence of
neurotechnologies, not only in medicine, but also, in our everyday life.
The compilation has been divided into three main parts, each one of them dealing
with three different problems concerning emerging neurotechnologies. Part I focuses
on the question regarding human nature and the importance of developing a shared
vocabulary on these issues. Part II deals with possible responses to the main ethical
problems generated by the current neurotechnologies and, finally, Part III focuses on
1 Towards an Ethical Discussion … 3
some proposals regarding neurorights and possible policies to protect our privacy,
neural data, and intimacy, with reference to emerging neurodevices. Given the wide
range of topics, this book is necessary interdisciplinary: the different authors deal with
problems and concerns generated by the emerging neurotechnologies starting from
philosophical, ethical, clinical, legal, anthropological, and bioethical perspectives.
In this sense, the aim of the book is to offer different approaches and standpoints
on a current hot topic. Furthermore, given the diverse geographic distribution of the
authors, the different problems will be addressed from very different cultural points
of view, emerging from South America, Australia, Europe, and the United States.
The different parts of the compilation have been structured hierarchically, from the
most abstract—and fundamental—to the most practical and applied. Part I offers the
philosophical and anthropological basis concerning the emerging neurotechnologies.
In this sense, in Part I, a conceptual clarification is offered: in order to avoid funda-
mental problems, it is useful to better characterize the concept of “mind” (Chap. 2)
and its theoretical implication for our target debate. This field, which has been
reserved almost exclusively to philosophical investigations in the past, has begun to be
explored by cognitive sciences and manipulated by neurotechnologies, with evident
consequences in our “anthropological timage.” In this regard, the concept of mind is
strongly connected to the idea of the human being we may have, for this reason, in the
following contributions it is claimed that a non-reductionist approach to human mind,
consciousness, and experience is necessary for developing comprehensive frame-
works within the debate. In Chaps. 3 and 4 this comprehensive approach is explored
by facing the complexity of our experiences and the permanent emergence of human
freedom and autonomy within the human condition. Obviously, the most important
anthropological concerns and risks concerning neurotechnologies refer to the impact
they could have on our autonomy. Indeed, interventions in brain functioning might
have major (bad or good) implications for our free will and our autonomy (Chap. 5).
Such consequences on our autonomy might also imply new forms of interpreting
our responsibility towards our nature and other humans and living beings. For this
reason, a more “ecological” concept of responsibility is needed (Chap. 6) in order
to interpret the different feedback effects that emerging technologies are generating
on our nature. These new forms of responsibility and autonomy also require original
conceptual tools to protect personal human rights against possible reductionisms.
Here, the concept of cognitive liberty (Chap. 7) may represent an interesting ethical
and legal paradigm to face any possible threat to human intimacy and integrity when
pondering the potential effects of neurotechnological advances in our lives.
Part II deals precisely with the emerging ethical concerns with reference to human
integrity. This concept is particularly relevant in the current neurotechnological
debate that stresses a person’s right to control their brain states and to protect the
person against unauthorized brain interventions (Chap. 8). In this regard, both bioeth-
ical and ethical approaches are needed. On the one side, in order to protect personal
autonomy and free will it is useful to consider the issue of human vulnerability as an
anthropological and ethical starting point (Chap. 9). On the other, it is useful to find
practical tools—like a new informed consent—that may prevent improper interven-
tion in personal intimacy and allow for meaningful decision-making and implement
4 P. López-Silva and L. Valera
In John Milton’s Comus, the British poet writes “Thou canst not touch the freedom
of my mind”, depicting the human mind as the last bastion of privacy, freedom, and
agency. Such an idea remained unchallenged for a very long time. However, over
the last years, the development of neurotechnologies with direct access to neural
data is inviting us to critically reconsider the very notion of the mind as a secret and
inaccessible place. This scenario has not only motivated discussions about the ways
in which the access and control over our own neural data (mental privacy) could be
protected, but also, discussion about our very notions of the human mind and the
most fundamental anthropological model of ourselves. In this context, Protecting
the Mind: Challenges in Law, Neuroprotection, and Neurorights is an attempt to
meditate on a number of issues of current and future concern. We deeply hope that
this compilation motivates new developments in our target debate as there is much
to be discussed. Legal, Ethical, and Philosophical concerns about the way in which
neurotechnological advances might affect every-day life and our understanding of the
human condition certainly develop together and, for this reason, interdisciplinarity is
not merely desirable but a fundamental need. Let’s hope current and future researchers
1 Towards an Ethical Discussion … 5
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ethics of neurosecurity. Ethics Inf Technol 18(2):117–129
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Part I
Human Nature, Neurotechnologies,
and Philosophy: Main Concepts
Chapter 2
The Concept of Mind
in the Neuroprotection Debate
Pablo López-Silva
Projects such as the Brain Activity Map (BAM) are large-scale initiatives aiming at
providing ways to record and manipulate the activity of circuits, networks, and—
eventually—whole brains with single-neuron specificity (Alivisatos et al. 2013;
Andrews and Weiss 2012; Koch and Reid 2012). Going beyond current achieve-
ments in neurosciences, the BAM in specific is not only clarifying specific brain areas
underlying the production of conscious mental states, but it promises to describe with
unprecedented precision the specific neural paths that electric impulses in the brain
take in order to produce those mental states allowing the understanding of “how
brain processes produces perception, action, memories, thoughts, and conscious-
ness” (Alivisatos et al. 2013, 1). This type of ambitious research program comes
with a number of empirical, conceptual, and ethical worries, and for this reason, they
have been compared with the impact that the Human Genome Project have had in
sciences, ethics, and in the general understanding of the human condition.
P. López-Silva (B)
School of Psychology, Universidad de Valparaíso, Hontaneda 2653, Valparaiso, Chile
In a very recent interview, Rafael Yuste (2020, 1)—leading researcher of the Brain
Initiative—warns that “if we can read and transcript neural activity, we might be
able to read and transcript minds.” This means that, worryingly, the very possibility
of recording with such a precision the neural activity that produce specific mental
states might offer scientists the possibility of not only reading, but also controlling
the production of certain mental states in the minds of others in what has been called
“brain-hacking” (Yuste 2019). Over the last years, the impact that new neurotech-
nologies will have on important issues such as agency, liberty, control, and autonomy
have been the focus of a number of debates in neuroethics. Such discussions have
motivated the development of legal regulations aiming at protecting the general public
from possible misuses and abuses of invasive and non-invasive neurotechnologies
(López-Silva and Madrid 2021).
Following the opening of the BAM, in 2013 former US President Barack Obama
called attention upon the potential impact of neuroethological developments on
human rights, emphasizing the need to address questions about: “privacy, personal
agency, and moral responsibility for one’s actions,” along with important issues
regarding “stigmatization and discrimination based on neurological measures of
intelligence or other traits; and questions about the appropriate use of neuroscience
in the criminal-justice system” (Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioeth-
ical Issues 2014). Taking this into consideration, in a pioneering action, the Chilean
Senate dispatched in October of 2020 the first ever bill for the creation of a law in
neuroprotection. In its Article 4 (Bulletin N°13.828-19), the bill states that “The use
of any system or device, be it neurotechnology, BCI, or other, the purpose of which is
to access neuronal activity, invasively or non-invasively, with the potential to damage
the psychological and psychic continuity of the person, that is, their individual iden-
tity, or with the potential to diminish or damage the autonomy of their free will or
decision-making capacity, is prohibited.”
This bill will certainly set an important example of jurisprudence for any future
discussion of different governments around the world aiming at establishing specific
policies and laws to regulate the use of intrusive and non-intrusive neurotechnologies
in medical and non-medical contexts. However, with novelty comes a number of
questions. As I have recently suggested, one of the central weaknesses underlying
the current discussion about the establishment of specific neuroprotection laws in
Chile is the lack of definition of what is actually meant by these laws when referring
to the concept of mind or the mental (López-Silva 2019). This becomes a fundamental
issue when we realize that ‘the mind’ is exactly what the law is meant to protect (at
least from the way it has been written). The Chilean bill on neurorights makes use of
the concept of mind in a number of sentences without really specifying what is meant
by it. The problem with this is that, without a definition of such a central notion, a
number of interpretive, conceptual, and practical problems might arise when creating
specific legal frameworks; but more importantly, different problems might arise when
dealing with crimes against those very laws in trial contexts.
The aim of the remainder of this chapter is very modest. I argue that the issue
at hand is not a simple conceptual irrelevant matter, but rather, that we have good
reasons to demand an explicitly declared working-concept of how neuroprotection
2 The Concept of Mind in the Neuroprotection Debate 11
laws understand the concept of mind in order to avoid fundamental problems. After
that, I explore an alternative way in which the concept of mind can be integrated into
the legal debate including anthropological, biological and subjective (phenomenal)
elements that might respect the different pre-theoretical intuitions and dimensions
that motivate the neuroprotection crusade.
2016). Accordingly, the Morningside Group has proposed that any neurotechnolog-
ical development derived from the BRAIN initiative—or other projects alike—must
be accompanied by the development of a legal scaffolding aiming at protecting
“people’s privacy, identity, agency, and equality” (Yuste et al. 2017, 159). This legal
resource has been named as neurorights.
Yuste et al. (2017) proposes the creation of fundamental neurorights based on
four worries. (i) The right to privacy & consent refers to the right for a person to
keep her neural data private, ensuring that the ability to opt out of sharing is the
default mode of ownership of such data. (ii) The right to agency & identity is the
right for a person to preserve her sense of agency and human identity in light of
potential changes produced by the use of neurotechnologies. (iii) The third worry
has not been crystalized in the creation of a specific right yet. Such a worry refers to
the possibility of unequal augmentation of cognitive and physical functions through
the use of neurotechnologies and how this augmentation would reproduce different
and new types of inequalities. (iv) The last worry refers to the way in which certain
bias could become embedded into neurotechnological devices and how this might
be avoided.
Trying to operationalize these worries, a number of authors have stressed the
need for the creation of new rights such as the right for cognitive liberty, the right for
psychological continuity, and the right for mental privacy, among many others (Ienca
and Andorno 2017; Sommaggio et al. 2017; Ienca 2017). Such rights might consti-
tute the legal support for the defense against potential misuses of neurotechnologies
capable of accessing neurodata and controlling people’s cognitive and motor activ-
ities. However, while some authors suggest that current legal frameworks already
secure those “new” rights, others claim that such frameworks cannot deal with the
unique nature of the potential violations of privacy—and the like—posited by current
neurotechnological developments (Ienca and Andorno 2017). In fact, when schol-
arly reviewing current legal frameworks on the matter, the need for the creation of
specific neurorights is not undisputed (Shein 2013; López-Silva and Madrid 2021).
The idea here is that new threats to a certain right do not make necessary the creation
of new rights in the same way in which the creation of new ways of killing do not
make necessary the reformulation of the right to life. Perhaps, already existing laws
should broaden their scope by clearly integrating these potential violations, however,
if legal frameworks are too unspecific, it might be recommendable to create such new
rights. Either way, it is not my intention to solve this problem here, rather, to make
clear that the creation of new rights associated with possible misuses of neurodata-
recording neurotechnologies is an open debate. Instead, in the following section I
take the Chilean Bill for the creation of neurorights as a case study to point out
specific problems that emerge in the process of creation of actual neuroprotection
laws.
2 The Concept of Mind in the Neuroprotection Debate 13
Actively working with the members of the MorningSide Group and researchers from
different universities in Chile, in October of 2020 the Chilean Senate presented
the first ever bill for the creation of a law in neuroprotection (Senate of Chile,
2020, Bulletin N°13.828-19). After establishing its general aim—the protection of
the privacy and indemnity of the mental—the bill establishes a number of specific
rights and technical specificities associated with them. Prima facie, the project brings
genuine attention to the potential consequences of misuses of neurotechnologies,
however, the initiative seems to lack a clear and unified conceptual framework about
the mental, exactly what it promises to protect.
In the first paragraph of the Bill on neurorights the concept of “privacy of the
mental” is treated as a synonym of the term “privacy of neural data” as if they were
one and the same thing. This statement is very far from uncontroversial. In addition
to this, the bill uses the term “psychic” (in its “psychological” sense) to refer to
something, apparently, similar to the term “mental.” On the one hand, if these terms
mean exactly the same for the authors of the bill, it is not clear why they use different
concepts. On the other hand, if those terms try to capture different dimensions of
human life threatened by the misuses of neurotechnologies, it is not clear what the
differences between the terms are, and how the bill integrates them into a clear legal
regulation. This lack of conceptual clarity might posit a number of interpretative
problems in legal contexts. In fact, in its second part, the bill proposes to treat the
privacy of neural data in the same way human organs are treated by current legal
international laws, but it does not specify anything about the epistemically private
life of conscious human beings. Some might suggest that this distinction is simply
irrelevant, however, I disagree. Think about the term “physical pain.” Even if physical
pain is produced by C-type neurons firing, what is legally punishable is the pain
provoked to a person, and pain is not C-type neurons firing, but rather, a conscious
experience of a subject. Persons are not conscious of c-type neurons firing, they are
conscious of their pain. Focusing only on the neuronal side neglects the rich personal
structure of psychological meaning that accompanies experience of pain (and that
might lead to suffering). From this, the problem seems to be that the current treatment
of the terms associated to the mental dimension of human beings in the bill rests in
an identity relation between the worries about the mental and the worries about the
neural, a very debatable position for ethical and legal considerations.
In its current form, the Chilean bill collapses very different uses of the term
“mental” (all of them present in the expert philosophical literature) into an unclear
and problematic unity. This issue becomes more pressing when we look at what
the Chilean Civil Code establishes (Ministerio de Justicia 2021). In its 21st Article,
the code indicates that “technical terms from sciences and art will be taken in the
use that is given to them for those who profess such sciences and art; unless it is
clearly stated that they will be taken in a broad sense” (author’s translation). The
problem here is that, if the reach of the terms is not well defined in the bill, the
14 P. López-Silva
diversity of interpretations about what the mind is might affect legal processes and
policy-making.
Imagine that your neurodata is available in a neurodata bank under your consent.
Perhaps, you became a member of a—hypothetical—neuro-social network called
“NeuroBook” that allows you to connect with people with similar neural patterns;
perhaps, you were part of an experimental study that required you to give that consent.
In any case, somehow an evil-genius neuro-hacker accesses the neurodata bank,
becoming capable of reprogramming people’s minds by using the electric activity of
their smartphones. Using complex technological devices, the hacker recodifies such
electric activity controlling people’s behavior at his own will. The hacker is found
guilty of mental intromission. However, for the hacker’s defense, there is no issue
about the mind since the mind is a bunch of observed behaviors and nothing else.
Since no harm was reported by the victims, and no apparent harm can be deduced
from their observed behavior (because the victims did not experience any conscious
experience of being controlled), the concept of mind vanishes in the discussion.
The aim of this example is neither to defend a behaviorist view of the mind nor
ruling out the relevance of subjective conscious experience in legal debates. Rather,
this example aims at showing that the lack of conceptual clarity within our target
debate might influence the way in which the harm done to people can be evaluated.
Certainly, if neuroprotection laws only aim at protecting neural data, this should
be stated clearly. However, the problem with this alternative is that it might leave
outside of the reach of legal protection important dimensions of common everyday
mental life. In addition, the alternative seems not to be consistent with some of the
motivations underlying the whole neuroprotection debate (see Yuste et al. 2017). Let
me offer some philosophical background to understand this point.
The relationship between what we call the mind and the brain has attracted
the attention of neuroscientists and philosophers in light of a number of ground-
breaking neuroscientific developments during the last decades. The so-called brain-
mind problem (or body-mind problem) in analytic philosophy refers to the way in
which we should formulate the relationship between our private subjective experi-
ence of the world and the brain, two of the most fundamental dimensions of human
life at stake in the neuroprotection debate. In this context, the idea that the brain is
a necessary condition for the emergence of the type of mind that humans enjoy is
trivial. Indeed, it is difficult to think about the emergence of the type of mind humans
have without establishing some type of relationship with the type of brain we have.
However, it is not clear how the brain is causally connected to the existence of
the subjective dimension of the human mind, and more specifically, with conscious
mental states. In other words, it is not clear how conscious mental states emerge
from purely physical non-conscious matter (Nagel 2013). For this reason, caution
should be requested when neuroscientists claim to be able to “decode,” “transcript,”
or “read” the mind. In those cases, we only know that current neurotechnologies
might be able to capture the biological activity underlying the occurrence of certain
conscious mental states such as thoughts, beliefs, motor actions, etc. We simply
cannot claim that mental states can be completely reduced to brain activity, or that
neural activity really captures the richness of what we call the human mind.
2 The Concept of Mind in the Neuroprotection Debate 15
Considering this, an influential view within philosophy of mind claims that human
mental states are characterized for having a certain phenomenal character that is
irreducible and belongs to the conscious experience of the world and ourselves (Nagel
1974). Conscious mental states, then, are those where there is something that is like
to be in those states for a subject; a private way of living experiences that cannot be
accessed from 3rd person methods. In the same line, Jackson (1986) claims that such
a phenomenal character might not be reducible to the mere physical activity of the
brain, establishing an epistemic gap between this observable and measurable activity,
and the conscious state that—allegedly—emerges from that activity. Furthermore,
it is claimed that, once these properties emerge from the activity of the brain, they
cannot be reduced to the latter as they have new and specific features that belong
to the experiencing subject and not to the brain (Chalmers 1996). What this type of
philosophical position seems to capture is the idea that the mind is not the same as
the brain, a fundamental issue within our target discussion.
It is important to consider this issue within a legal context. The reduction of the
mental to the neural might imply a common error within cognitive sciences called
mereological fallacy. This error can be defined as the tendency to ascribe to the brain
properties that only make sense when ascribed to whole organisms (Bennett and
Hacker 2003). Brains are not conscious, brains do not enjoy agency or free will, and
certainly, brains do not experience pain or suffering. Such properties can only be
ascribed to persons, and persons enjoy a rich mental life that includes biological and
phenomenal dimensions. Importantly, a great number of the ethical worries regarding
the misuses of neurotechnologies comes from the phenomenal use of the concept of
mind (Yuste et al. 2017).
For example, the specific worry about the alteration of a sense of agency through
mental hacking locates the phenomenal use of the concept of the mental at the very
heart of the neuroprotection discussion, and more importantly, at heart of the specific
Chilean Bill. However, if the mental is the same as the neural, conscious features
such as the sense of agency are simply not considered in any way within the specific
regulation derived from the bill. Here it is relevant to clarify that I do not think
that phenomenal considerations should be taken as the most fundamental indicator
of autonomy violations. Multiple studies in clinical psychiatry and psychopathology
have shown that the sense of agency is a very volatile and fragile feature of our mental
conscious life (Haggard and Eitam 2015). The sense of agency might even be altered
by making a subject to believe that I have been brain-hacking him, without actually
doing it. More important here is the fact that a technically well performed brain-
hacking trick could actually produce actions in others that might include a sense of
agency, this, if the recodification of the specific motor actions is well specified—as
it is promised by the BAM. Here, perhaps in the same way in which physical pain
can be an aggravating element in a trail for violent robbery, alterations in conscious
experience of brain-hacked people might be included in this context as an aggravating
element in cases of mental intromission. However, the way in which neuroprotection
laws include different uses of the concept of the mental should be clearly stated in
order to avoid problems in law-making and legal decisions.
16 P. López-Silva
The use of the concept of mind in the current Chilean Bill on Neurorights seems to be
underlain by very reductionists ways of understanding this key dimension of human
life. Perhaps, this issue has been inherited from a non-openly declared physicalist
reductionism at the foundations of projects such as the BAM. In this chapter, I have
tried to make clear how this lack of precision creates a number of problems that
might affect legal decisions in the future. If neural activity is a necessary condition
for the emergence of the mind, then it is not clear that the bill really protects the
mind. Rather, it would protect one of the conditions for its existence. Now, if neural
activity is taken to be the same as the mind, we can either use the already existing
laws on personal data or deny the existence of a phenomenal privacy that can be
affected by neurotechnologies. However, the latter option seems very implausible as
the conscious suffering associated with these potential misuses of neurotechnology
seems to be one of the main motivating worries underlying the project (p. 4–5), and,
for there are good reasons to claim that the mind is not the same as the brain.
Here, it is important to consider that the human mind is more than these two
apparently distinct dimensions. In fact, this way of setting up the discussion might
be contentious. As Lowe (2003) rightly points out, there might not be such a thing
as “the mind.” Rather, there are minded beings, you and I as subjects of conscious
experiences such as feeling, perceiving, thinking, and so on. Properly understood, the
mind-body problem that we have been referring to in the last section is the problem
of how subjects of experience are related to their physical bodies. At the same time,
it is fundamental to clarify that we cannot expect the authors of the bill to solve
the mind-body problem in order to continue the process of construction of specific
laws on neuroprotection. What we can actually demand is that, when considering the
concept of mind, they should take a broader anthropological point of view.
A way of solving the apparent conundrum within the neurorights bill is to endorse
the view that persons have minds, and those minds are different from their bodies;
but at the same time, all of those dimensions exist in a unified psycho-physical whole.
Minded persons are neither their bodies nor their neural activity. More importantly,
the brain and the mind of a person are unlike one another in respect of the types
of properties that each can possess. From this point of view, it is not the case that
human beings have neural activity and that such activity is the mind of those persons.
Rather, persons are subjects of experience and, as such, possess both mental and
physical features. Persons are things that feel and think, but also have shape, mass,
and spatial-temporal location.
As aforementioned, mental properties cannot be attributed to brains without facing
mereological problems. Mental properties cannot even be attributable to parts of a
certain person, but rather, to the personal as a whole. As Lowe (2003, 16) suggests:
“It is I who think and feel, not my brain or body, even if I need to have a brain and
Body in order to be able to think and feel.” Furthermore, persons and brains have
different persistence-conditions, that is the conditions under that object continues
to survive as an object of its kind. While a brain will continue to survive as long
2 The Concept of Mind in the Neuroprotection Debate 17
as its functional biological conditions are satisfied, it is not obvious that a person
could survive the demise of her body and brain, and this is exactly what I mean by
such different dimensions living in a unity (see Jonas 2001). It is fundamental for the
neuroprotection debate to take into consideration the fact that mental properties are
significantly different from physical properties of the brain (Craig 2016), and that
the type of being that enjoys mental properties are more complex that neurons firing.
In order to avoid mereological and reductionist problems, and in order to make real
progress in the task of protecting the human mind, legal frameworks should move
from a concept of minds of brains, to a concept of minds of persons.
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Chapter 3
The Unitary Sense of Human Being.
A Husserlian Approach Against
Reductionism
Abstract We are a whole: body and mind, nature and spirit, in short, we are people.
And this fact, so endorsed by the most common experiences of our existence, cannot
be ruined by insistent scientist glances in naturalizing consciousness, qualifying as
philosophical illusionism any margin of exceptionality granted to what makes us
human beings. The thesis that sustains this chapter is that, independently of the
novelty of the neuroscientific tendencies that Husserl could not even glimpse, both
in the analysis of his presuppositions, as in that of his consequences, the research
of the Moravian philosopher can still serve us. For this to be so, we must first show
that neurosciences fall within the positivist paradigm whose criticism motivated the
emergence of phenomenology. It is a question, then, of analyzing how narrow and
reduced is the concept of experience handled by positivism, in the light of the analyzes
of genetic phenomenology and of passive syntheses that, in our opinion, continue to
serve as an explanatory framework that makes possible the fruitful dialogue between
neuroscience and philosophy.
J. M. Chillón (B)
Department of Philosophy, Universidad de Valladolid, Valladolid, Spain
e-mail: josemanuel@fyl.uva.es
are some of the examples that give us a clue that we are actually a systemic, organic
and unitary whole. Regardless of the mode of connection, and however the pineal
gland of the body-spirit interaction is resolved, we are a whole.1
The spiritualist and materialistic tendencies, in their various historical nomen-
clatures, seem to bend the common sense of our self with permanent reductive
approaches. By taking the very act of thinking as the only indubitable bastion in
the face of everything contingent—following the ingenuity of Descartes-, the former
offer an unshakeable certainty at the cost of an irrecoverable truth in their solipsistic
versions. Having as their objective to make explicit the traceability of theoretical,
estimative or practical mental events, the latter end up naturalizing consciousness in
a de-ontologization of itself, hence disregarding the specificity of the human person.
Husserl calls into question this second tendency, since it threatens the unity of
person. Why? Because in the twentieth century, the greatest danger to the possi-
bility of philosophy was commencing: to consider that its scientific status was called
into question from the very moment in which, what had to be known and how it
had to be known, was already perfectly designed by the natural sciences and their
overwhelming success. Thus, if consciousness can be explained as another fact of
the realm of Tatsachen, with its same methods and rudiments, with the principle of
causality as a model of scientific explanation, then there will be no place to justify the
singularity and genuineness of the human (Husserl 1941).2 Subjects cannot dissolve
into being nature—the founder of phenomenology had argued—since then what gives
meaning to nature would be lacking (Husserl 1989). The omni-explanatory tendency
of scientism is decidedly repellent to any attempt at a unitary understanding of human
being, and therefore to any possibility of restoring the idea of philosophy as scientia
omnium rerum. This is precisely because it refuses to understand the transcendental
relevance of any way of overcoming the perspective of pure facts. The thesis that
this chapter holds is that, regardless of the novelty of the neuroscientific tendencies
that Husserl could not even glimpse, in the analysis of both their presuppositions and
their consequences, the analysis of the Moravian philosopher can still help us. Are
not still latent naturalistic assumptions behind certain neuroscientific approaches?
To naturalize consciousness is to reduce its immense horizontic capacity, its
constitutive mysterious dimension, and its determining constitutive faculty that gives
meaning to the world. Behind any naturalistic tendency, there is a reductionist attempt
that does not pay attention to the need of reflecting, for example, on the limits of
technological interventions, on the unity of the person as the foundation and, in short,
on the meaning of human existence and on fully human experience.3 Therefore, this
1 Human being is, then, a real unity of body and soul (Husserl 1989).
2 Schaefer (2009, 13) has explained in this regard that Husserl is the last great representative of
the idea of human exception, which consists in the fact that the human has the specificity of being
able to transcend his own naturalness. This in turn seems to be a hindrance to the cartesian duality
between “nature” and “spirit.” In short, it is an anti-naturalism that is held as a common thesis
in his works from Logical Investigations, Philosophy as Strict Science or The Crisis of European
Sciences.
3 Husserl’s famous conference of 1931, Phenomenologie und Antropologie (Husserl 1941) holds
as a general thesis this same idea of rejecting any philosophical perspective that tends to naturalize
3 The Unitary Sense of Human Being … 21
It is not an affront to philosophy that neurosciences and other cognitive sciences have
as their objective the description of processes of knowledge and the explanation of the
functioning of the mind. To be able to make explicit the internal processes of thinking
from empirical parameters linked to research on the functioning of neuronal synapses
turns out to be an obvious manifestation of the progress of science. Likewise, it is
also the explanation of how certain brain areas are activated depending on the nature
of the concrete conscious operations or different experiences. Where does the critical
problem for phenomenology lie? In the same statute of scientificity of these sciences
and in how the methodological approach to consciousness is biased when having as
its objective the dissolution of the great existential problems. For instance, the risk
of freedom, the experience of emotion, the overflow of love, or anguishing suffering
5 That statement from Crisis (Husserl 1970) is memorable: “Merely fact-minded sciences make
merely fact-minded people.”.
6 “Genetic and developmental processes determine the connections between neurons, that is, which
neurons make synaptic connections with which others, and when they do so. But they do not
determine the tenacity of those connections. Tenacity—long-term effectiveness of synaptic connec-
tions—is regulated by experience. This conception implies that the potential for many organisms’
behaviours is something intrinsic to the brain. To that extent, it is subject to the control of genes and
development. Nonetheless, the environment and the learning of a creature alter the effectiveness
of the pre-existing pathways and thus enable the expression of new behavioural profiles” (Kandel
2007, 237).
3 The Unitary Sense of Human Being … 23
could all have a neurological path that can be described. Thus, for certain neuro-
scientific assumptions, the great abysses of human experience, when approached
with the rigor of the empirical method of the natural sciences, will be definitively
clarified and diminished in their mystery claims.7 Does then describing and, in the
event of a condition, being able to intervene surgically or pharmacologically, mean
dissolving? Is there not a metaphysical error here about what the personal being of
subject means? Husserl, in fact, had already clarified that the essence of naturalism
was the consideration of nature as a unit of space-time being according to exact
natural laws. Naturalism—maintains the philosopher—tends to treat everything as
nature, falsifying the meaning of every domain that resists this type of approach
(Husserl 2002).
Accordingly, there are two reductive strategies: the first one has to do with content,
considering consciousness explained exactly when the complex neural networks of
the brain are shown. So, the brain is considered as the organ responsible for all
cognitive experience. The second, on the other hand, is the one that refers to the
methodological strategy of approaching the problem of consciousness considered as
one of many facts to be explained through the scientific arsenal. If the first strategy
reduces the field of experience of consciousness to pure conscious acts, fundamen-
tally of a gnoseological type, then, the second annuls the specificity of the human
precisely because of the professed ontological monism. So, the problem of naturalism
is an epistemological problem (about how it should be known and in relation to what
knowledge is) and a metaphysical problem (relative to how reality is composed only
of that type of entities accessible to scientific methods).
From this scientism, the integrity of the human experience is lost from sight. This
is because a certain observation by neuroimaging is extrapolated as data or also as
the result of a certain test. Are we going to deny, for example, that the production
of language has to do with the activation of the brain’s place where the Broca and
Wernicke areas are located? In any case, it will be necessary to insist that language
determines and constitutes a whole linguistic experience whose truth is not entirely
explained by this naturalizing tendency.
In the experience of language itself, not only the conscious activities of the indi-
vidual such as speaking, naming or expressing themselves are amalgamated and
structurally interrelated, but also a whole complex network of lived experiences,
acquired habits and social conventions. These latter examples fall within what Husserl
calls the passive syntheses determined by the genesis of consciousness. Aristotle, in
some way, had already advanced similar thoughts: the experience of production of
meanings had to attend not only to a purely internal process of the subject, but also to
a whole hermeneutical experience that had to integrate individual faculties, conven-
tional aspects, as well as an evident guarantee of intersubjectivity. This is so in order
for all legein to be semainein.
7 These are some of the theses of Wheatley (2015) in which it is stated that thought and action
are physically produced in neural activity. He further asserts, as an uncontroversial fact, that these
neurons cannot individually or collectively choose whether or not to send electrical signals, with
the obvious problems of free will whose assertion—Wheatley sustains—does not seem to respect
physical laws.
24 J. M. Chillón
The idea that the faculty to use meaningful language in order to express and
communicate is located and specified in only one area of our organism, only speaks
in favour of the integrity of the human being. Hence, language, which is a profoundly
human experience, responsible for our openness to the world and to others, that is
also what shapes our deepest convictions and values, and furthermore, intertwines
our coexistence and social agreements, has its material and bodily basis in the brain
section that originates the possibility of language. This is its necessary condition, or
in other words, its condition of organic possibility. Nevertheless, the lived experience
of language is not actually explained despite of improved neuroimaging techniques
or by a real-time computerization of the speech process. Any analysis of the human
experience, such as this one of language, needs to be understood from an integral
idea of the human being. The experience of language is just one example of how
decisive the neurological and neuropsychological approach to the problem is. This is
evidenced, for instance, by being an essential part in a more effective rehabilitation
for cases of cerebrovascular accidents that compromise the faculty of language. Yet,
it is worth noting that the experience of language is not the only thing that can be
said about the being that each one is and her horizontic experience of the word.
For the field of philosophy, it seems necessary to let neuroscientists know that
with which they are dealing is more than an organ and its multiplicity of operations
or an instrument and its functions, but the realm in which the truth is lived, the depth
of the existence is experienced and the freedom is wanted. This is something that
no empirical methodology can try to exhaust in a single formula, in an image or
in a diagnosis. Even more, it is in this manner that the so-called “hard problem” of
consciousness was raised, as Varela seems to point out, consisting of the impossibility
of explaining phenomenological performances from neural data. In sum, science has
the first word, but not the last.
To clarify these points, other examples could help. In the psychic sphere, drugs
with active principles such as fluoxetine, paroxetine, escitalopram or sertraline,
to name a few, have long been established to intervene in the reuptake processes
of serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine, assuming the psychiatric relevance of
the monoaminergic hypothesis. Accordingly, maintaining adequate levels of these
neurotransmitters by inhibiting an excessively absorbent tendency seemed to have an
obvious cause-effect relationship on emotional stability. This shows that the chem-
istry behind these drugs works but not only by themselves, which is the reason
why professionals urge for psychological-behavioural therapies that can comple-
ment pharmacological treatment. These psychological-behavioural therapies should
help re-semantizing those vital areas that seem to have become meaningless. Addi-
tionally, new research on the intervention of these drugs in the neuroplasticity of the
brain suggests that there is a definite importance of the environment in increasing
the effectiveness of such drugs on personal well being, thus going beyond the pure
chemical approach.8
8 We have referred to pharmacological use in psychiatry precisely because of the relevance it has in
the context of this book on technological interventions in the brain. However, it is evident that all
medicine measures the quality of its praxis precisely in the need to care for the person as a whole.
3 The Unitary Sense of Human Being … 25
Ultimately, any example is sufficient to sustain the integrity of the person from
the unity of human experience since every conscious act is a way of “being aware
of .” Any purportedly objective treatment from the scientist perspective leaves out the
significance, the intentional opening of consciousness to the world, and ultimately,
everything that human experience has of personal fulfillment. Not only this, but it also
leaves out both the surrounding world of things, as well as the entire conglomeration
of meanings constituted by life in common with others. “What we do not understand is
the inescapable problem posed by consciousness: the mystery of how neural activity
originates subjective experience” (Kandel 2007, 440).
A few paragraphs above, we mentioned reductionism in terms of content, as if
the mind were nothing more than a kind of bundle of especially representational
conscious processes, that is, fundamentally linked by their relationship with what is
outside of consciousness. If only so, we would have the unique mission of perfecting
quantitative, measurable and objective introspection techniques. Nevertheless, even
if this first reduction of the mind to its epistemic power were to be accepted, then it
would be also easy to realize the partial competence of the empirical approach.
Let us think of acts of a perceptual type, the simplest. Perception not only confronts
the subject with the world from the most basic sensible immediacy, but it is also
already incorporating time in some way and, in this sense, the lived experience.
One may say, for example, that I perceive the computer on which I write and I can
anticipate what the perception of this object will be if I close it, if I put it on its
side, or if I myself turn around to look at it from another angle. Perceptions occur in
the subjective experience that gives them meaning until they contextualize each one
of them in a long series of observations that make the world meaningful, not only
because of the retained experience (past experience) but also because of the future
experience, the expectation.
Certainly, conscious acts do not occur in a pure now, i.e., in a totally new present.
Each conscious now, each experience, welcomes the prehistory of other “now” that
have already happened and the perspective of the “now” yet to come. In short
Damasio’s (1996, 255) words “the present is never here. We are always late to
consciousness.” It can be said that investigating through high techniques the simple
mental fact of perception will offer multiple interesting data for the neurosciences,
for the diagnosis of certain conditions. However, these techniques could not interfere
with the idea that the punctual perceptual act constitutes and, at the same time, is
constituted by perceptual experience, understood as historical experience that also
gives meaning to the world.9 This experience constituted in history is not only indi-
vidual, but also intersubjective since that perceptual act is integrated into a formation
of collective and cultural meaning.10 The key point that phenomenology does in this
9 In addition to this, as Husserl explained in the IV Meditation, the self develops a constant style
in the performance of her acts with an uninterrupted unity of identity, a personal character. So, in
this way, each punctual act can neither be studied nor understood in its pure individual and present
occurrence.
10 Even though we cannot enter particularly in this field, it is necessary to point out how the neuro-
scientific finding of mirror neurons was a unique challenge to the phenomenological understanding
of intersubjectivity. “Mirror neurons are cells in the premotor cortex of humans and monkeys,
26 J. M. Chillón
regard, consists in showing that all human experience, being subjective, is not subjec-
tivist. In other words, all experience carries within itself its transcendental relevance
precisely because reason is not a mere factual faculty but “an essential and universal
structure of transcendental subjectivity” (Husserl 1982, § 53).
Regarding our conscious experience, whatever it may be, has a lot of constituted
experience, and not just a constituent one. Human life is an experience installed in
subsoil, in a horizon of sediments of meaning. It could be said it is in a Lebenswelt,
in a wide pre-reflective field to which we are referred from what Husserl explains in
Ideas II (Husserl 1989) calls operative intentionality (fungierende Intentionalität).
It is no longer only a matter of the inherent tendency of our conscious acts to give
themselves to the world, to that intentionality of which the empiricist assumptions
of naturalism cannot account. It is actually an entire structural, unconscious, passive
framework that operates within us as an infrastructure of meaning in our ways of
being intentionally referred to the contents of our noetic acts. Hence, the meaning
does not only occur in the noema, as an intentional performance of noetic acts. It also
does so even in the way in which the noetic noematic intentionality operates, being
already constituted by presuppositions of meaning that go beyond any reductionist
attempt.11
Furthermore, all of this becomes much more complicated if we continue to analyse
the representational capacity of consciousness. Of course, this happens if we achieve
to deepen into other extra-epistemic missions of consciousness such as the vast
field of emotions, of feelings or of fantasy. This was what Varela actually wanted
to warn when he put into circulation the concept of enaction: it refers precisely to
a non-representational cognitive mode, which is supported simply by a manner of
information processing. This notion was understood as the genuine way in which
consciousness makes it emerge both the identity of the subject and the configuration
of his world in an evolutionarily forged structural coupling. Consequently, authors
such like Varela, Vermensch, and Depraz, among others, have ended up talking
about neurophenomenology as a promising complementary line of research between
cognitive sciences and phenomenology. “Neurophenomenology is the field that tries
to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience,
thus placing itself in the lineage of the continental tradition of phenomenology”
(Varela 1996, 330).12
which discharge when one performs certain actions and are also active when one observes the
same or similar actions being performed by others. Since their discovery in 1996, mirror neurons
have attracted considerable philosophical and scientific attention, due largely to their possible
implications for theories of intersubjectivity” (Ratcliffe 2006, 329).
11 For this reason, the description of an activity, of a concrete praxis, requires investigating the
conscious activity insofar as it perceives itself unfolding in an operative and immanent mode, both
habitual and pre-reflective. It is the idea collected in Depraz et al. (2003, 42) about how cognitive
reflection starts from pre-reflective conscience, pre-discursive, pre-noetic, ante-predicative, tacit,
pre-verbal, pre-logical, or non-conceptual. An initial approach to these questions that is highly
suggestive, can be seen in Ordóñez (2015).
12 This is an example of an integrative and interdisciplinary trend that led this phenomenological
perspective to turn to other traditions about human experience, such as the oriental one (cf. Tenzen
2006). Varela and Shear (1999) assumed the need to integrate the introspection issues of psychology
3 The Unitary Sense of Human Being … 27
The fact that the complexity and the extensiveness of human experience are not
explained from the rigid scheme of the theory of knowledge, as if our entire expe-
rience of the world were a way of making explicit the unidirectional connection
between what is immanent and what transcendent, is what forces phenomenology
to access exactly the moment prior to this epistemic dissection: the realm of lived
experience. We should remember the philosophical fertility of this find within the
work of Franz Brentano. The peculiarity of psychic acts was given by their apod-
icticity, accordingly, making philosophy to focus on the access to the evidence of
immanence and in the discovery of the bilaterality of all experience. This is what
Brentano called the wonder of wonders: the intimate correlation between the psychic
act and the physical phenomenon to which it tends.
We could assume, in a very initial and simple way, that the maturing of
phenomenology commences it advances from a first Platonism. This Platonism
assumes the existence of areas of objectivity and absolute ideality and considers that
the important thing in philosophy is the analysis of the nature of the conscious acts
to which these ideas are given, in other words, to which these essences come to open.
This finding is what allows the discovery of the constituent function of conscious-
ness in the noematic direction of all experience, which, in turn, as consciousness
situated in the world, is always constituted. In any case, what is decisive in this
phenomenological understanding of a lived experience is how the apodicticity of
immanence ends up moving from the psychic act (as empirical psychology would
have arranged) to the content of the act itself, to the world correlatively given and
constituted as sense in the determination of what subjective experience means, not as
concrete experience, but as transcendental experience, as transcendental vitality.13
How to access this realm of the immanent? Husserl’s phenomenology condensed
into the notion of reduction the adequate method to achieve this access. This is a
question of redirecting oneself to the sphere from which the sense of the world for
consciousness emanates. To reduce oneself was nothing more than to remain only
with the transcendental performance of the world in what the world means for my
life, in what it is supposed to be for every subject to have experience of the world.
And for this, phenomenology had to be willing to change course to a new attitude
that, precisely, would allow that access to an original state where it is discovered how
with the contributions of phenomenology, mainly around reduction, and the Buddhist and Vedic
traditions. “Phenomenological accounts of the structure of experience and their counterparts in
cognitive science relate to each other through reciprocal constraints” (Varela 1996, 343). These
efforts were about assuming the scientific relevance of the insubstantiality of the self, the end of the
idea of the solid, centralized and unitary self, as it has been directly assumed by Buddhist practices.
13 With regards to the question of personal identity and the non-impersonal meaning of existence,
particularly views that try to establish the difference between the notion of person and the identity
of the self, this needs a second-person phenomenology approach. In order to read this kind of view,
please refer to Crowell (2021). One can say that all Sein is reduced to a Bewusstsein, that is, all
being ends up being a sense of being (San Martín 1994, 259).
28 J. M. Chillón
the world is there for me “not only as a world of mere things, but also with the same
immediacy as a world of objects with values, a world of goods, a practical world”
(Husserl 1983, 53). This thing that is first and original is no longer the obvious fact
of how consciousness is open to the world, but the prior awareness of conscious acts
that is accessed by an alternative attitude to positivism.
Phenomenology advances by investigating from an understanding of the self,
considered a mere bundle of experiences, or even a pure monadological empty
container, to a notion of the self as a complex of lived experiences. These lived
experiences, whose ingredient immanence refers to a transcendent immanence,
broadens the field of evidence from cogito to cogitatum, to the world that is
for consciousness, independently of its verifiable transcendent existence. Natu-
ralism precisely denied any transcendental perspective with the evident consequence
of the dogmatic reduction of consciousness to the description of conscious acts
mechanically considered.
Somehow, the motivation that Husserl had already in 1898 is becoming clear: the
intimate correlation between consciousness and the world. If we follow this same
reflective line, then perhaps we can see that phenomenology, from the beginning,
demands a complete conception of the human, which an empirical approach cannot
give. Accordingly, having an experience is, in a way, having the world, living the
world, knowing that you exist in the world. Neurophenomenology, in its laboratory
practice, assumes the fertility of the phenomenological method both of epojé (to
the extent that beliefs or theories about experience are suspended), and of reduction
(Gallagher 2012, 80).
As explained by Husserl (2002) all way of living means a position take. Taking a
position is to know that oneself is linked to ideas that claim to be rules of absolute
validity. This mainly according to the demands of reason that determines what a life
lived in the responsibility of the truth means. Yet, this can only happen if the value of
ideas, of the deep convictions that have moved people to open up to them, to surrender
to them, is assumed. So, can the idea be ontologically distorted into fact? Isn’t the
understanding that reality is an amalgam of facts part of a meagre metaphysical
position? Are not ideas a part of reality? Are not real those convictions that make men
advance towards the potential assuming the phenomenological primacy of possibility
over reality?
All these questions point to what philosophy cannot deny: the transcendental
work that offers the possibility of investigating what is valid for every human being
and for all understanding of subjective experience. Every individual experience of a
concrete person, which is situated in a specific moment and anchored in a concrete
history, lies within the transcendental order, which is to say, in the order of what it
can be worth for any other experience. From this point of view, the transcendental
abandons, so to speak, its absolute and residual monadological status that is typical
of the idealistic understanding of consciousness. From this, the transcendental moves
toward a conception of intersubjectivity, as a “we” whose structures for the produc-
tion of meaning (the entire scope of the spiritual) imply reciprocal and empathetic
recognition. Therefore, one may ask doesn’t neuroscientific naturalism actually end
3 The Unitary Sense of Human Being … 29
up undermining the very concept of experience? And moreover, without the pecu-
liarity of the experience, where will the human being find the meaning of his life as
a concrete being and of humanity as a collective project?
3.4 Conclusion
References
Arran Gare
Abstract One way of developing an ethics for neuroscience is to extend the Hippo-
cratic Oath as an ethical code, taking the health of the patient as the first consid-
eration, and maintaining utmost respect for human life. In this paper I will defend
this approach but argue that respect for human life is far more problematic than
it seems. Respect for human life would appear to entail respect for the autonomy
of people as conscious agents, but mainstream reductionist science and those who
fund it enframe humans as standing reserves to be exploited efficiently. Utilizing the
perspective provided by philosophical anthropology against such science, I argue
that the Hippocratic Oath should be extended to embrace the Kantian imperative to
treat humanity always as an end in itself, never as a mere means, implying that neuro-
science and its associated medical practices should take as their end the maintenance
and augmentation of human autonomy.
A. Gare (B)
Department of Social Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
e-mail: agare@swin.edu.au
from Epidemics, Book I, of the Hippocratic school: “Practice two things in your deal-
ings with disease: either help or do not harm the patient.” This was later simplified to
the most basic precept of the Hippocratic Oath: “First, do no harm.” It is one of the
principal precepts of bioethics that all students in healthcare that, given an existing
problem, it may be better not to do something, or even to do nothing, than to risk
causing more harm than good.
The development of neurotechnology could be subsumed with little modification
under the Geneva formulation of the Hippocratic Oath, extending this precept to a
commitment not to damage people’s psychological health. On this precept, it should
be very clear that the old practice of lobotomizing supposedly mentally ill patients,
severing connections in the brain’s prefrontal cortex and leaving them emotionally
shallow, lethargic and unable to concentrate or take initiative, making it easier to
manage chronically agitated, delusional, self-destructive, or violent patients, should
have been ruled out when it was being practiced. Nowadays, there are far more inter-
ventions in the functioning of the brain available, and it is less clear what damage to
psychological health would mean. Furthermore, with the development of neurotech-
nology, interventions in the future could go well beyond treatment of patients with
neurological disorders. They could be used to “improve” ordinary people. This makes
it all the more important to characterize psychological health.
The biggest problem is that as far as modern science is concerned, mind and
consciousness are problematic concepts, while “common sense” views are often
vague and contradictory. This makes the notion of psychological health problematic.
Many sciences, with the support of a good many philosophers, are committed to
explaining away the mind and consciousness, or only allowing that consciousness
is an epiphenomenon. A whole tradition of philosophy, originating with Thomas
Hobbes, has striven to understand humans as nothing but complex machines. This
has come to be identified with the scientific view of humans and has had a major influ-
ence on psychology. With the development of Neo-Darwinism, molecular biology
and information science, humans, as with other forms of life, have been charac-
terized as machines for reproducing genes, where genes are understood as strings
of DNA encoding information. The brain is then seen as an information processor,
that is, essentially a computer. Humans can then be characterized as information
processing cyborgs, with the brain being nothing but a carbon-based computer. This
is the conception of humans now being promoted by transhumanists, who argue that
the extensions of humans through technology should be welcomed as an extension
of what we are as humans, and in a more extreme form by the posthumanists who
argue that the whole idea of the human was a temporary aberration and should be
abandoned.
From this perspective, if there is a place for health it would amount to not hindering
the efficiency with which human organisms are able to process information and act
4 Ethics and Neuroscience: Protecting Consciousness 33
efficiently on the basis of this information, and if possible, augmenting this efficiency.
If parts of the body, including the brain, are seen as defective, there should be no
problem with replacing them with artificial parts. Just as it is possible to provide
amputees with artificial limbs, or people with defective hearts with artificial hearts,
if the brain is defective in some way and cannot be repaired, or was defective to begin
with, it should be possible to replace part of it with prosthetic parts. Some proponents
of this view of life argue that in future it will be possible to download minds onto
computers. If this is the case, it might be possible to replace the whole of people’s
brains with prosthetic brains, not only repairing defects, but greatly augmenting their
power to retain and process information. Ordinary people will be able to far surpass
the greatest chess masters of the present, and will be free of emotions which at present
interfere with their efficiency.
If these arguments are correct, then with this conception of humans there should
be no problem with traditional concerns about modifying the brain, such as concern
with the effects of lobotomising patients to address their mental disorders, electro-
convulsive and insulin shock therapy to cure their depression by destroying their
memories, cutting the corpus callosum to cure epilepsy, or modifying people’s moods
with chemicals so they will be content with their current life. With the conception of
the brain promoted by information scientists, neurotechnologists are entirely justified
in attempting to modify people’s brains, possibly by removing bits and adding artifi-
cial components in order to make them conform to social conventions and think and
act more efficiently. In fact, such procedures could be defended on the grounds that
this will make humans more competitive with the robots that will be manufactured
incorporating new advances in artificial intelligence.
The lesson that should be learnt from this is that the code of ethics that should
be adopted in neurotechnology depends almost entirely on how the mind and the
brain and their relationship are understood. At present, it is reductionist science
culminating in the mechanization of the mind by cybernetics and information science
that are taken to be the cutting edge of science and are being embraced not only by
scientists but also by philosophers.
However, this raises another issue. Is this triumph of cybernetics and information
science due to their having proved themselves to be the most promising research
program, or because science itself is being corrupted? Funding comes from govern-
ments and increasingly, big business, who overwhelmingly fund the kind of science
that will facilitate increased control over nature and people to advance military tech-
nology and/or generate more profits for corporations. The implicit goal is to replace
humans as much as possible to reduce war casualties and labour costs, and to control
or eliminate people who no longer have a place in this brave new world. There are now
a number of works showing this to be the case, with governments forcing academics
to obtain their funding from business corporations to ensure that it is only this kind of
science that is funded. If this is the case, what is required is not only a code of ethics
for neurotechnology, but a code of ethics for science itself to prevent its corruption.
But then the problem could be not just the corruption of science, but with science
as such. The commitment to explanation involves a commitment to reductionism,
since explanations imply showing that appearances are nothing but the effects of
34 A. Gare
something else. Following this logic, the ultimate explanations will be in terms
of the basic existents of the universe. These used to be thought of as elementary
particles or force fields, but information has now been added to these. This trajec-
tory and its consequences were foreseen by Martin Heidegger. As he wrote in The
Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger 1977, 21): “Modern science’s way of
representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces. Modern
physics is not experimental because it applies apparatus to the questioning of nature.
The reverse is true. Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to
exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it orders its experiments
precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set
up in this way.” While initially, the subject was privileged as a non-objective being
in control of science, he ends up being dissolved by objective science. As Heidegger
(1977, 152f.) wrote in The Age of the World Picture: “In the planetary imperialism
of technologically organized man, the subjectivism of man attains its acme, from
which point it will descend to the level of organized uniformity and there firmly
establish itself. This uniformity becomes the surest instrument of total, i.e., techno-
logical, rule over the earth. The modern freedom of subjectivity vanishes totally in the
objectivity commensurate with it.” The rise of cybernetics and the triumph of infor-
mation science committed to total control of the world is the inevitable outcome. As
Heidegger (1978, 375f.) observed in The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking:
“No prophecy is necessary to recognize that the sciences now establishing themselves
will soon be determined and steered by the new fundamental science which is called
cybernetics. [...] For it is the theory of the steering of the possible planning and
arrangement of human labour. Cybernetics transforms language into an exchange of
news. The arts become regulated-regulating instruments of information.”
So long as we accept this conception of science, the idea of a code of ethics for
anything, let alone a code for neurotechnology, is problematic. If a code of ethics is
to be defended for anything at all, it is necessary to re-open the question, what are
humans? and What is science?
These questions cannot be answered from within science by itself. They can only
be answered with reference to the humanities. Since Plato, the question what are
humans has always been at the centre of philosophy and the basis of the humanities.
It was central to Aristotle’s philosophy and it was central to Hobbes’ philosophy in
his effort to replace Aristotle’s conception of humans. While Hobbes’ philosophy
was entrenched in culture through the scientism that he had defended, implying that
only mechanistic science produces genuine knowledge, his work problematized the
subject and subjective experience. While empiricists, granting a place to sense expe-
rience, attempted to uphold scientism, their efforts to do so were undermined by
4 Ethics and Neuroscience: Protecting Consciousness 35
their assumptions. In the last paragraph of his book An Inquiry into Human Under-
standing, Hume (1953, 173) concluded: “When we run over libraries, persuaded by
these principles, what havoc must we make? […] [L]et us ask, does it contain any
abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experi-
mental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the
flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.” This injunction would
require the reader to cast his own book into the flames.
It was in response to such work that Kant was inspired to make philosophical
anthropology the focus of his philosophy. In his Introduction to Logic (2005, 17),
published in its final form in 1800 and which guided his critical philosophy, Kant
proclaimed that philosophy in its cosmic sense “is the only science which has a
systematic connection, and gives systematic unity to all the other sciences.” It can be
reduced to four questions, “what can I know?” “What ought I to do?” “What may I
hope?” and “what is Man?” and Kant concluded “all these might be reckoned under
anthropology, since the first three questions refer to the last.”
It should be noted that while philosophical anthropology is made central to philos-
ophy, it is inseparable from other domains of philosophy. If the question “what can
I know?” can only be answered with reference to philosophical anthropology, the
claim of philosophical anthropology to supply knowledge presupposes an answer to
the question “what can I know?” Similarly, to engage in efforts to achieve such knowl-
edge in order to work out “what ought I to do?” already presupposes that we know
what we ought to do—engage in such efforts. The focus on philosophical anthro-
pology made these interconnections clear, and appreciation of this was central to all
Kantian, neo-Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, including hermeneutic philos-
ophy and phenomenology. What Kant showed was that the conception of humans
put forward by Hobbes and the empiricists was too impoverished to account for the
possibility of science. To account for science, we have to recognize the creative role
of the subject in perception and in acquiring knowledge, requiring much more robust
notions of imagination, reasoning and agency than the mechanistic view and the
empiricism it engendered could countenance. It is also necessary to accord a place
to the human capacity for autonomy, without which, all apparent beliefs would have
to be viewed as epiphenomena of physical processes and no better or worse than any
other beliefs, except in so far as they provide an advantage in the struggle for survival
by what are now characterized as “gene machines,” machines for reproducing DNA.
Philosophical anthropology has been the thread running through what analytic
philosophers deride as “continental philosophy,” having been developed by Kant’s
students, Herder and Fichte, and then by the Early Romantics and Idealists such
as Hegel, then through to hermeneuticists such as Dilthey, neo-Kantians such as
Ernst Cassirer, by the pragmatists, and many of the phenomenologists. These neo-
Kantian and post-Kantian philosophers emphasised the essential social nature of
human consciousness, that humans only develop the capacity for freedom through
viewing themselves from the perspective of others and through being formed by their
cultures, and generally, they promoted an ethics based on the notion of mutual recog-
nition of each other’s freedom, self-realization as participants within communities,
and recognition of the intrinsic value of life.
36 A. Gare
Friedrich Schelling was exemplary in this regard, arguing that humans conceived
as such have to be understood as having evolved within nature. If there is a clash
between this conception of humans and Newtonian physics, then physics will have to
be transformed. Accepting Kant’s argument that we organize our experience through
imagination and concepts, but rejecting Kant’s claim that through transcendental
deductions it can be shown that we have to accept the concepts of prevailing physics,
he argued that we can criticise and replace defective concepts and thereby bring
nature, and humanity as part of nature, to a higher state of consciousness of itself
through us. To this end, he argued for a philosophical physics in which activity,
later characterized as energy, is fundamental, and characterized matter in terms
of forces, arguing that this new physics would make magnetism, electricity and
light and the relationship between them intelligible. He also argued for the devel-
opment of new mathematics adequate to this more dynamic view of nature. On the
basis of these concepts he argued for an evolutionary cosmology granting a place
to emergence through the limiting of activity. Emergent entities might appear as
objects, for instance crystals or chemicals of various kinds, but Schelling argued,
these should be seen to be products of the activity of opposing forces achieving a
balance. They are emergent, and to some extent immanent causes of themselves,
and this makes it impossible to explain them as merely the effects of their environ-
ments and constituents. In chemistry, these opposing forces are now referred to as
valances which generate molecules of various complexity and stability. Schelling
characterized the distinctive characteristics of living beings as processes that must
actively maintain their form while interacting with their environments, so these envi-
ronments are defined in relation to them as their worlds. With this characterization
of life, it was then possible to characterize and explain the distinctive characteristics
of humans as essentially social, self-conscious beings living in culturally constituted
worlds, capable of understanding their own history within the context of the history
of nature and reflection on and transforming their cultures. In all cases, living beings,
including humans, are inseparable from their environments, but are to some extent
the immanent causes of themselves.
These are the ideas which triumphed with the development of thermodynamics
and the field theories of electro-magnetism of Faraday and Maxwell, with the devel-
opment of chemistry and then relativity theory showing that matter is really a form of
energy. While mainstream biology is reductionist, reductionism has been shown to
be incoherent (matter can’t evolve) and is strongly challenged by holistic ideas asso-
ciated with systems theory, including the theory of complex adaptive systems and
anticipatory systems theory, process metaphysics, hierarchy theory, biosemiotics,
and efforts to account for consciousness using quantum field theory (Vitiello 2002;
Ho 2004, 228ff.). All these are part of the anti-reductionist tradition of thought and
research program inspired by Schelling and those he influenced (Gare 2013). These
are the forms of thinking being advanced in modern science that are consistent with
work in philosophical biology and philosophical anthropology. Advances in science
have produced what Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (1984, xxixf.) called “the
new alliance” between science and the humanities.
4 Ethics and Neuroscience: Protecting Consciousness 37
Most scientists do not accept this post-Newtonian research program, however. They
still promote particle physics or string theory rather than accept the advances in
quantum field theories, and claim that statistical mechanics as developed by Ludwig
Bolzmann has displaced thermodynamics. And they fail to appreciate the modern
chemistry and nuclear physics are triumphs of Schelling’s post-reductionist thinking.
On the basis of their acceptance of statistical mechanics, ignoring its limitations
(for instance, accounting for phase transitions, let alone the dissipative structures
examined by Prigogine) they embrace Boltzmann’s notion of entropy and equate
negative entropy with the notion of information developed by Shannon to analyse
the capacity of cables to transmit messages. As noted, combined with cybernetics,
this notion of information provides the foundation of information science, and it is
claimed to be able to account, along with molecular biology, for life and mind.
These views are not accepted by advanced theoretical biology, however. Jesper
Hoffmeyer (1997) in Signs of Meaning in the Universe, essentially a manifesto for
biosemiotics based on Peirce’s philosophy, pointed out that “form” for the Romans
was a mangled version of the Greek “morf ” (or “morph”), and “information” meant
being formed mentally. Atomistic thinking in the Twentieth Century led “informa-
tion” to be understood as isolated chunks of knowledge and this was taken over by
the physicists, who then characterized it as something in the world, independent of
anyone, and then tried to impose this inverted, desiccated concept of information
on all other disciplines. In his later book Biosemiotics, he wrote that “up-to-date
biology must acknowledge that the biochemical concept of information is just too
impoverished to be of any explanatory use” (Hoffmeyer 2008, 61). As far as the
computational notion of the mind is concerned, as Jeremy Fodor (2000) pointed out,
the mind does not work that way.
Is it just a matter of choice between rival research traditions? My contention is that
it is not. The tradition inspired by Schelling is far more coherent and has proved far
more fruitful than the rival reductionist tradition, even when this reductionist tradition
utilizes concepts such as fields (in bowdlerized form) inspired by the Schellingian
tradition and incorporates the notion of information. The post-Newtonian tradi-
tion can make intelligible whatever advances have been made through reductionist
approaches in the sciences, while reductionist approaches cannot make sense of
what is comprehensible from the anti-reductionist research tradition, including the
existence of ourselves as conscious beings. Reductionism is the dominant tradition
because science has been corrupted. Firstly, by those who fund science who are for
the most part only interested in knowledge that facilitates control over nature and
people. This is what reductionist science delivers. It is based on controlling situations
and modifying components to enable predictions to be made; that is, as Heidegger
observed, enframing the world to reveal it as standing reserve to be controlled and
exploited. Secondly, it is far easier to develop such science. Following the “scientific
method,” ultra-specialists add small increments to the bucket of scientific knowledge.
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wohl an genügendem Materiale weiter zu untersuchen (s.
B u r m e i s t e r Tarsius 1846, 17 u. 126 und W e b e r 265).
Alle mir bekannten Exemplare 1 von den Sangi Inseln weichen durch
den weniger behaarten Schwanz und die wenig behaarten Tarsen
von dem gleich grossen T. fuscus ab, sie nähern sich also darin der
Philippinen-Form mit ihrem ganz spärlich und kurz behaarten (und
unbeschuppten) Schwanz und ihren so gut wie nackten Tarsen,
während fuscus gut behaarte Tarsen und einen sehr stark behaarten
Schwanz hat. Die langen und dunklen Haare des Schwanzes
reichen bei sangirensis proximal nicht so weit und die Haare sind
kürzer. Die Beschuppung ist dieselbe wie bei fuscus. Das Museum
besitzt ein Exemplar von Siao und eins von Gross Sangi, das
Berliner, Wiener und Braunschweiger je eins von Gross Sangi
(erstere 4 aus meinen Sammlungen, letzteres von Dr. P l a t e n ) mit
denselben Charakteren, 2 das Leidener (Cat. XI, 81 1892) eins von
„Sangi“, von dem Dr. J e n t i n k so freundlich war mir mitzutheilen,
dass der Schwanz und der Tarsus weniger behaart seien als bei
Celebes Exemplaren. Es liegt hierin also eine insulare Abweichung
und eine Hinneigung zur Philippinen Form. Ich hoffe später eine
Abbildung der Art geben zu können.
Tafel IV
Ich beschrieb diese Art Abh. Mus. Dresden 1894/5 Nr. 1 und habe
dem Gesagten wenig hinzuzufügen, da die Abbildung in n. Gr. zur
weiteren Erkennung der Merkmale genügen dürfte. Nur über die
Behaarung des Schwanzes möchte ich noch einige Worte sagen, da
diese, der Natur der Sache nach, in der Abbildung nicht deutlich
genug wiedergegeben werden konnte. Die proximalen ¾ des
Schwanzes sind fast nackt, nur mit spärlich und einzeln stehenden,
kaum 1 mm langen weissen Härchen besetzt; am distalen Viertel
werden sie allmählich bis 3 mm lang und an den distalen 4
Centimetern stehen sie eng aneinander und sind bräunlich gefärbt.
— Das Museum erhielt inzwischen 2 weitere Exemplare von den
Philippinen, und zwar noch eins von Samar durch Dr.
S c h a d e n b e r g und eins von Nord Mindanao durch Dr. R i z a l .
Das rothbraune Gesicht und überhaupt die braunere Farbe ist bei
allen auffallend, und sie sind hierdurch zusammen mit den fast
nackten Tarsen und dem wenig behaarten Schwanze leicht von
anderen Tarsiern zu unterscheiden.
[Inhalt]
9. Tarsius spectrum (Pall.)
Tafel V und VI
Ein altes Männchen und ein junges Weibchen sind auf Tafel V in ⅕–
⅙ n. Gr. abgebildet.
Da mir das Exemplar 2310 in Spiritus zukam, so liess ich die (linke)
Vola und Planta, ihres bemerkenswerthen Oberflächenreliefs wegen,
photographiren und bilde sie Tafel VI Figur 2 und 3 in n. Gr. ab. Ein
auffallender Unterschied mit anderen von mir daraufhin untersuchten
Paradoxuri besteht darin, dass die Tastballen bei P. musschenbroeki
glatt, bei jenen gefeldert sind.