I think, therefore I am. Despite often being presented as a truism, Descartes’ old saying is the conclusion of a thought experiment designed to question existence itself.

Imagine an omnipotent demon that can manipulate all your senses, leaving you with no means to ascertain the credibility of any incoming information about your surrounding reality. In fact, you cannot even be sure that there is a surrounding reality. But (so the argument goes) there is at the very least one thing that you can be sure of: your own existence. It may be that you have no way of accessing reality itself, but if you are able to reflect – think – about what constitutes reality (and whether there is such a thing at all), then at the very least, there must be somebody in existence who is able to do that kind of reasoning. And that somebody is your conscious self. Hence the contention: ‘I think, therefore I am’.

Psychoanalysts have always been somewhat skeptical of this line of argument. This is probably with good reason. At the heart of psychoanalysis lies the ontological question about what exactly constitutes the entity we usually denote as ‘the self’.

Freud dissected the self into three different entities: the unconscious id (our basic instinctual drives, the source of bodily needs and wants); the repressing superego (the internalisation of cultural rules and moral standards as absorbed from our parents and other authority figures); and the part-conscious ego which constantly seeks to mediate between the drives of the id and the demands of the perfection-aiming superego. Freuds ontological setup represents a kind of philosophical organicism in the sense that it operates with entities at a lower level that interact to maintain the coherence of a higher-level entity, which in this case is the self. The psychological self is part of the organic whole that is the human biological individual, which is again delineated from the outside world by the sharp boundaries of the body.

Within biology, organicism has a long history as a framework for analysing organised entities at different levels. It comes in various versions, ranging from William Morton Wheeler’s notion of the ant colony as a superorganism to James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, where Earth itself is conceived as a sort of organism. A key question within this line of thinking (to which we will return) is the problem of where to set the boundary between these organised entities and their externalities. Over time, fine-grained biological investigations have given countless examples which demonstrate that – in terms of biological properties like metabolism and the immune system – the dividing line between an organism and its surroundings is in fact rather blurred. Organisms are in constant exchange with their environments to maintain internal coherence and actively change it to the extent that it may be considered part of their phenotype. Both plants and animals engage in symbiotic relations with microbes that are vital to protection against diseases. Notions of individuality are challenged by modular organisms (as in certain types of fungi) that branch into heterogenous and semiautonomous reproductive units. Look close enough and any neatness will be swallowed by nature’s complexity.

Enter science and technology studies, as well as the philosophy of technology. Within these domains of inquiry there has been a longstanding tendency of blurring the boundaries between the biological and the artificial. Famous here is, of course, Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. Haraway proposes the cyborg as a metaphor for a ‘countermyth’ to the dichotomist thinking of Aristotelian essentialism, where basic categories are ordered into binary pairs such as male-female; active-passive; normal-deviant. In this context, the ‘cyborg’ (literally cybernetic organism) is a metaphor that is deliberately tainted by the impure, a hybrid between the organic and the technological. In Haraway’s techno-organicist cosmology (sic!), we are all cyborgs, having long integrated technology systematically into our lives.

The idea that the systematic employment of technology co-constitutes what it means to be human really does have some empirical merit. During the most important part of our own evolutionary history (which is approximately the last 2 million years) the systematic manufacturing of stone tools has coevolved with a massive increase in brain size, which separates us from all other primates. Today, of course, advanced technology permeates every aspect of our lives. In this sense, we have indeed become the cyborgs that Haraway talks about. Even rather basic things like human perception have been changed and enhanced by technological mediation. Contemporary discussions of human technology have become pervaded by ideas of the post- or transhuman as the cutting edge in our next stage of evolution.

A funny thing happened along the way, however. Whereas ‘cyborg philosophy’ (and its many intellectual derivations) has become broadly influential within academia, this line of thinking is now being challenged by the emergence of technologies that bring us much closer to the appearance of ‘real’ cyborgs in the original sense of the word.

Collectively, these are known as invasive brain technologies, and they were originally introduced for medical purposes. Among the oldest and (in medical terms) most successful of the technologies is Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS). Sometimes described as a kind of ‘brain pacemaker’, DBS is a surgical procedure in which a neurostimulator is implanted within the brain along with electrodes that send electrical signals to the parts of the brain responsible for movement control. DBS is routinely used to treat a range of movement disorders including Parkinson’s disease, essential tremor, and dystonia. It has also been used to treat other kinds of disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), major depression, and schizophrenia. DBS is currently being considered as a possible treatment for drug addiction as well.

Of course, brain surgery does not come without risks. The possible neuropsychiatric side effects for DBS include apathy, hallucinations, cognitive dysfunction, hypersexuality, depression, and euphoria. It is easy to imagine that these side effects may lead to significant behavioural changes in those affected. Within neuroethics there has also been discussions of whether DBS may even cause changes in personality or sense of self-identity. Case studies of patients undergoing treatment with DBS for Parkinson’s disease reveal that a significant number of people experience postoperative neuropsychiatric changes. One study, aptly titled “I Miss Being Me: Phenomenological Effects of Deep Brain Stimulation”, concluded that the experience of ‘post-operative self-estrangement’ increased the more alienated patients had felt by their illness prior to operation. Another study, where DBS was used to treat depression, found that patients reported postoperative feelings of self-estrangement, and impulse aggressive behaviours that remained even after implant removal.

Ongoing advancements in invasive bra in technologies suggests that this problem may become even greater in the future. Whereas DBS is only directed towards movement control, there are other technologies which are more closely connected with thought processes. Experimental studies on rodents, for instance, have demonstrated that it is possible to plant false memories in them. The prospect of doing the same in humans seems as taken right out of dystopian science fiction. Memories constitute an important part of personhood and our notion of the human self. The idea that these elements may be manipulated by, say, totalitarian powers, indeed seems frightening. Should such a nightmarish possibility ever become reality in a scaled-up and applied version, it could have devastating consequences to both democracy and any imaginable notion of free will.

Closer to the present we find Elon Musk’s Neuralink brain chip, a device which allows people to interact with computers (for instance by moving a computer cursor) by mind control. In the short term, it is designed to help people with paralysis. The first patient to receive a Neuralink implant was 29-year old Nolan Arbaugh, who was paralyzed in 2016 from the shoulders down after a diving accident. With the help of his implant, Arbaugh is now able to employ a range of computer functions by using his mind, including playing online chess games.

Neuralink’s ambitions, however, do not stop at helping the physically impaired. It is a stated ambition of the company that their technology will be used to enhance brain capacity, allowing for communicating through thoughts, accessing information just by thinking about it, or writing an email without using a keyboard. On the surface, these may merely seem like somewhat superficial benefits of cognitive enhancement. But a faster and more efficient thinking process is bound to influence the behaviour and feelings of people with brain-computer interfaces. Thus, the question here is not whether invasive brain technologies will facilitate personality changes, but what kind of personality changes, and whether they are desirable or not. Lurking in the shadows of these problems is, of course, the ageold question of what it means to be human at all.

Finally, the prospect of invasive neurodevices gives rise to another set of problems connected with the notion of free will. I am, of course, referring to the possibility that Neuralink or a similar set of invasive brain technologies may be hacked or abused. This could be for the purposes of personal data collection and mining, on a massive scale, in much the same way as how personal computers are already being co-opted for cryptocurrency mining. This opens up the possibility of a whole range of sinister big brother-scenarios, in which citizens are observed, tracked, and manipulated to control their thoughts, opinions, votes, and so on. In short, the promise of invasive brain technology may be like opening a Pandora’s box of technological body-snatching. And once it is open, it cannot be closed.

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