Agency, Responsibility, Selves, and the Mechanical Mind
Philosophies January 20, 2021 Fiorella Battaglia
Moral issues arise not only when neural technology directly affects people's lives but also when its interventions indirectly conceptualize the mind in new ways. The paper reviews theories of consciousness, subjectivity, and third-person perspectives on the brain, particularly as applied to an "extended mind," and identifies a major transformation in philosophy of action. This transformation is understood through additional epistemic devices, including a legal perspective on regulating human–machine interaction and a personality theory of the symbiotic connection between human and machine. The author argues this is a new area of philosophical concern characterized by self-objectification, which becomes "alienation" following Ernst Kapp's philosophy of technology. The paper contends that intervening in the brain can affect how we conceptualize the mind and modify its predicaments.