Cognitive Freedom Fighter: With brain implants and memory erasure becoming reality, Wrye Sententia is bringing constitutional rights into your head
Better Humans
"I can imagine the tabloid ads for personal injury lawyers specializing in things like 'faulty cerebral implants' and 'accidents' involving memory erasure," says Wrye Sententia, cofounder of the Davis, California-based Centre for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics (CCLE). "As bizarre as it may sound, if we do not work to ensure that our democratic, constitutional rights can weather the transition to tomorrow, we may find ourselves unprotected in a world where we have no recourse for complaint."
Following the hit films Paycheck (2003) and The Manchurian Candidate (2004), the specter of corporate memory control has reappeared in the popular imaginary. We know the dream factory has pulled much here from fiction, but how much do these stories draw from fact?
I had the chance to speak with Sententia about the explosive developments in the fields of neurotechnology and cognitive liberty—and the even more fascinating legal problems they raise.
Here are some excerpts from our conversation:
In an interview with New Scientist, CCLE cofounder Richard Glen Boire made the spooky intimation that cognitive liberty is poised to be one of the major civil rights issues of the century. What is this new concept, exactly?
Cognitive liberty is the right of an individual to liberty, autonomy and privacy over his or her own intellect, and is situated at the core of what it means to be a free person. This principle is what gave rise to some of our most well-established and cherished democratic rights.
Cognitive liberty presupposes at least these three principles: cognitive privacy (what and how you think should be private unless you choose to share it); cognitive autonomy (self-determination over one's own cognition is central to free will); and cognitive choice (the capabilities of the human mind should not be limited).
If we stop and think about what freedom of thought means to us, it's really about personal autonomy—in the sense that I can direct my life, not necessarily that I am outside of a web of social relations—and privacy. Not necessarily because I don't want to share my thoughts, but because I want to retain authority over when, where, how and with certain caveats, I may do so. Most people believe—and to a large extent, this has been the case—that we do have freedom of thought.
Until recently, freedom of thought has been a kind of commonsense assumption, a birthright in a functioning democracy which allows us to more or less pick and choose our own ideology and guide our life according to our own experience, beliefs and influences. Yet as some of the plausible outgrowths of today's neurotechnologies take hold in society at large, we will face a qualitatively different kind of freedom. It is going to be important that we know and anticipate valid concerns over the use of neurotechnologies.
The thought that someday I might need a lawyer to protect my individual "rights of mind" is rather incredible, to say nothing of the horror I feel at the thought of "mental violation," if one can conceive of it as such.
You hit on it. Both a disgust at a potentially invasive abuse of your private thoughts, and at the prospect of lawyers encroaching on yet another area to litigate our lives.
Are we merely expanding the definition of personal privacy, or are there new, empirical developments that give us cause to believe that our freedom of thought is or might at some point be endangered?
Today, new drugs and other technologies are being developed for augmenting, monitoring and manipulating mental processes. The very definitions of medicine and mental health are evolving as a result of the explosion in neurotechnologies and neuropharmaceuticals.
Things like fMRIs, that grew out of MRI technology; "noninvasive" brain scanning techniques; "brain fingerprinting" as a tool for law enforcement; applications such as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation; preventative "mental health"; enhancement pharmaceuticals; "neuromarketing" are all examples that are getting more attention these days in relation to higher cognitive functions.
Another example that the CCLE is tracking is the proposed use of hypersonic sound to project noise, music or voices directly inside your head. Hypersonic sound is a "silent" sonic device that could be used, for instance, as yet another way to get our attention. You might walk by a soda machine on a hot day, and hear the refreshing sound of ice shifting in a glass.
There's also the whole emerging field of nanotechnology and nanomedicine as explored by Robert Freitas that will have implications for how we interact with consciousness, the brain-mind, the body-brain, etc.
We can also anticipate a day when so-called germ line or genetic engineering biotechnologies of the future will potentially impact the selective reshaping or enhancing of cognitive abilities, and consequently these distant possibilities raise the same polarized issues regarding personhood and human "essence."
Most people have heard of Prozac or Paxil, but how much time will it be before some of these more dramatic applications become household names?
To my knowledge, even though a number of nascent applications of brain imaging and brain scanning technologies currently exist, most are in the experimental or research stage, and certainly are not yet being used unwittingly on private citizens.
The hard technical feasibility of gauging or influencing a person's thoughts is still in its infancy. Most of the equipment used to glean information from our brain's patterns has only been around for a couple decades. Likewise, while EEG technology has improved, and the invention of LED "noninvasive" brain scanning techniques are underway, the applications are still largely in the research phases and the scientific viability of some of these methods are still hotly disputed.
I'm not sure how likely the neural net possibility will be; the scientists, computer engineers and neurologists are better judges of that than I. I honestly think that we're not even close to uploading our consciousness to computers—whatever that would entail and if ever we would want to.
Nonetheless, the applications are already being touted.
Neuropharmaceuticals are an area where changes in culture and deficiencies in the law are already apparent and are already influencing how we, as a society, think about drug chemistry and the brain. Today's spectrum of antidepressants that work on the dopamine and norapinephrine neurotransmitters make people feel better by readjusting the chemical activity, or say, serotonin levels in the brain.
Even though some take a prohibitionary position in regards to "human enhancement"—like the President's Council on Bioethics who issued their Beyond Therapy report on this topic about a year ago—it's likely that, even if the US bans a generalized, nonprescription use of future drugs to improve attention, mood and even memory, these drugs will go on a "black market" in the same way Ritalin has become a subverted drug in high schools and even junior high.
Suffice it to say that neurotechnologies are already here, and more are coming—and we have more examples up on our Website (http://www.cognitiveliberty.org).
Just to take a closer look at what may or may not be already obvious, what do these technologies give us to worry about? Aren't they being developed in the aim of improving general mental health and functioning for everyone?
Quite simply, individuals and collective freedom are threatened when these technologies are applied or regulated without clear guiding principles.
Because our laws currently, as I understand them, only protect people from unreasonable or hurtful decibels, in other words, from loud noise, what happens when you are subjected to silent sound? If your thoughts can be subject to unwanted scrutiny, what rights do you have to keep others' probing at bay? How do physicians distinguish between medical and "enhancement" applications? Should they? What about insurance coverage? What does "treating the well" mean?
These are just a few of the neuroethical questions doctors are facing, and that society will also increasingly face, and the sort of issues among many that my colleagues and I grapple with on a daily basis.
But to date, only a small handful of neuroscientists are concerned about issues like mind-reading or merged consciousness as real possibilities, and most—if they think about this at all—are concerned with neuroethics in relation to experimental subjects in a lab.
Neuroethics, obviously, deals with the responsibilities behind the creation and use of applications such as fMRIs.
Neuroethics is a relatively new field concerned with the benefits and dangers of modern research on the brain, and by extension, with the social, legal and ethical implications of treating or manipulating consciousness.
It's important for us to think about what is at issue in the use or application of neurotechnologies.
Some people are more apt to embrace new experiences and new technologies while others are less inclined to experiment. As with biotechnology developments, the shift from strictly therapeutic uses of neurotechnologies, including drugs, will (and indeed already is) move from deficit to enhancement applications. Some will use neurotechnologies only if they absolutely have to, in order to compensate for a disorder, others will be first in line following Wired's first glossy ad touting a first "reliable" mental augmentation device.
This points, I think, to the fundamental question of choice in a democracy. No one should be forced to use neurotechnologies, but we shouldn't be prohibiting their use either. The problem arises when we try to apply our personal standards—even through the dubious valence of what constitutes "public health"—to others' lifestyle choices.
At the CCLE I am working to make a future that will allow those who will want to dissolve the boundaries of self—through the use of neural nets, or sensorial transposition, etc.—do that, while also protecting those who find that concept unsettling, or even repulsive, to have socially palatable lives without unreasonable pressure to "conform" to something else. So, we're working for both the freedom to use new neurotechnologies for benefit, and a freedom from surreptitious or compelled uses of the same.
Could you give us a bit of an overview of the Centre for Cognitive Liberty and what you do there?
As director of the CCLE, I'm involved with most every aspect of the vision for the CCLE and for now, with a lot of the minutiae in daily operations of the office. My own work is largely on neuroethics—considering what the implications of cognitive technologies are or may be in the near-future, then analyzing these for their impact on freedom of thought, and then getting the word out about the possible consequences. To this end, I oversee projects that help focus public attention on current trends in relation to what we have defined as individual rights of mind—or what we at the CCLE are calling neuropolicy.
Richard Glen Boire, the other director of the CCLE and an attorney, is looking at how the new field of neurotheology—which uses brain imaging to learn about spiritual states of mind—could reshape our understanding of freedom of religion.
Our overarching goal is to advance sustainable policies that protect freedom of thought. We work to promote both public awareness and the legal recognition of cognitive liberty.
Because the CCLE is nonprofit and our work is funded largely by generous individuals and a select number of granting institutions, it's important that what we do on a daily basis have a practical import—we feel, from where we are at, and where culture is at in general, that our efforts and intellects are best put to use where the skin hits the pavement. That's why our neuropolicy focuses on what we can see coming—and our vision may prove to be short-sighted—first in the realm of neuropharmaceuticals that have a direct link to our material body-brains, and then on those technologies that try to capture the brain's electrical/magnetic activity in order to deduce thoughts.
The CCLE is trying to foresee hot spots, and ensure that the US legal system and a global public will be able to cope with the shifting parameters of a right to freedom of thought. Freedom of thought—and of religion—is expressed in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, article 8, and the right to privacy is implied in the US Constitution. We see a need to expand the definition of privacy to encompass the sphere of our inner choices—even if that choice is to forgo their interiority!
So you want to create and protect individual rights to give up the traditional sense of individuality as well as the freedom to give up the traditional sense of "freedom of thought?"
Exactly. Without protecting freedom of thought in a budding neurotechnological age as an individual's right to self-determine—the very basis of so many of the freedoms we enjoy—we will see our liberty not only eroded under poor management by governments, but we could see these freedoms disappear entirely.
I don't mean to sound melodramatic, but when you think about the rapid changes that our culture is undergoing in terms of technological capability and the divergence in views about what reality is or "should" be, we have to be careful to preserve the gains of our history as a free society, without stifling our collective and individual potential.
An individual's right to self-determine his or her own conscious states is therefore something that we see, in today's emerging conditions, as taking on renewed constitutional importance.
We're saying that the values we have as a free society need to be readdressed. It's not so much a radical existentialism, as an appeal to our common democratic principles and our constitution—this is the framing for our work in neuroethics. Freedom of thought is exactly what it sounds like, it is the very heart of our individuality (or conformity) and it is the foundation of a free society. Laurence Tribe, who is a well-known constitutional attorney and legal scholar at Harvard, has written that "the guarantee of free expression is inextricably linked to the protection and preservation of open and unfettered mental activity." His point is that without freedom of thought, you can't have freedom of speech. Nor can you have freedom of religion, or privacy.
It's certainly an understatement to say that this is an exciting, important area to be working in. You must have a lot of vision in order to keep going at breaking such tough, new ground.
Yes. I'm interested in cognitive liberty not only as a right, but as a call to action both personally, and collectively.
This is why for my part, I would like people to consider the wrinkles in the neuroethics debates to better help us find common ground in effecting viable neuropolicies in our democracy. What can we agree on, despite our differing professional and personal points of view regarding trends in psychopharmacology, computer-brain interfaces and related cognitive neuroscience developments? I'm looking to improve pluralism in the sense of a vibrant free society that embraces tolerance, creativity and choice to maximize mental diversity.
Even though humanity is still plagued by age-old problems of greed, war and hypocrisy (the essentialist-pessimists would say this is human nature), I'm of the camp that thinks these might be growing pains, and that with greater cognitive liberty in every sense, we might overcome not only our own, but our species', small thinking.
Has the CCLE faced any particularly difficult opposition?
Obstacles to what we're doing are largely in the realm of education. I don't get the feeling that most people consider the implications for a number of current trends I've discussed in terms of their own freedoms. I mean, I could count off the camps of "staunchly opposed" and "strongly in favour" of things like cognitive enhancement, but that is ancillary to the larger picture.
As Christine Peterson, president of the Foresight Institute, and I mused at a recent "Technosapiens" bioethics conference in Washington, DC, sponsored by Christians, wouldn't it be great to get the transhumanists and the Catholics to agree on something? Mutual tolerance in a changing world is really a necessary goal—if nothing but that lesson is learned by today's generations of young people poring over the daily headlines of death and stupidity at work in the world, we will have become a better race.
I guess my belief is that the protection of cognitive liberty as a way of negotiating culture and the role of humanity now and in the future is the best place to start. That is to say, people need to decide, what is best for themselves, in terms of participating or not, in the coming waves of change. Just as our current nation can accommodate the Amish—who by the way, embrace certain technologies if it will clearly benefit their society and not diminish their values—as well as philosophical positions such as transhumanism, I don't see why we shouldn't be able to let people pursue their own pursuit of happiness.
Is there anything people can do to help or support the development of neuroethics and neuropolicy?
Thank you for asking. The assistance that the CCLE most needs is valuable feedback on what we are working for (some of your questions have given me just that), collaboration with specialists who have expertise in neuroscience, medicine and the law, and—most important of all—cold, hard cash or digital stock-transferred contributions. Our general donation page is at http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/gift.html
I should have mentioned funding as an obstacle to our effectiveness as well. Needless to say, you can't run an operation on vision alone, and following the post-dot.com slumps—on the West coast at least—our current donor pool has certainly been affected. I've been doing the CCLE for two full years now, and before that, worked in drug policy under the Alchemind Society.
It's pretty accurate to say that if we don't secure operational funds to keep our work going by the end of January 2005, we're going to have to renegotiate our roles and close down the office. I would really like to keep going with the CCLE, particularly because I feel that we're only beginning to hit on a number of important advances, socially, politically and legally.
I'm amazed by the number of calls and interest we get from the press, who later go on to use our information in their articles; likewise with university audiences and legal scholars.
So, if any of your readers are themselves in a position to help, or have names of individuals who might be potentially interested in funding our work, please do have them email me, wrye(at)cognitiveliberty.org.
SOURCE: Better Humans
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