Guy Kahane, filosofo oxoniense y director delegado del centro Uehiro de Etica Practica o Aplicada de la Universidad de Oxford , especialista en neuroetica y filosofia de la mente y de la neurociencia asi como la obra de Wittgenstein, ha publicado en la seccion Perspectivas de la prestigiosa revista medica The Lancet, unas reflexiones muy interesantes sobre el avance de la neurotecnologia y su poder para algun dia "leer la mente".
Imaginate un mundo donde se pudiera leer la mente, donde la mentira, el engaño no existiera y la opresion y el totalitarismo o las distopias orwellianas pudieran explotarse al maximo, las consecuencias para la especie humana del avance neurocientifico en tecnicas capaces de hacer publica nuestra vida mas intima y privada con las sensaciones, sentimientos y pensamientos al descubierto seria para la etica y el comportameinto hacia los demas, tremendo y terrorifico.
Guy kahane, dice (reproduccion completa del texto):
“The intense intellectual and emotional life, and the
heightening of sensations which came with the advance
of civilization, made it clear to men that only a part of
pain, pleasure, and profi t of life lay in physical things.
Thoughts, emotions, and sensations demanded legal
recognition”, wrote Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis in
the landmark 1890 paper that fi rst introduced the right
to privacy to legal discourse. Warren and Brandeis saw
themselves as articulating a moral idea that was already
implicitly recognised but fi nally forced into the open by
“recent inventions and business methods”—that is, by
“instantaneous” photography and tabloid gossip columns.
Warren and Brandeis were giving legal voice to the
increasing demand for privacy that accompanied the
rise of the middle classes in western countries during the
19th century. The Victorians were greatly preoccupied
with the inner life. Indeed, William James’s The Principles
of Psychology, with its vivid metaphor of the stream of
consciousness, was also published in 1890, and by then
his brother Henry James and other novelists had already
embarked on the great modernist project of capturing in
prose that hidden stream of thoughts and sensations—
letting their readers peer into another’s inner life, seen as if
through a transparent glass.
Having just been “discovered”, privacy’s limits were soon
put to the test in the 20th century. The threat was not gossip
columns, but the totalitarian state, where one’s closest
and dearest might be secret informants and even trivial
acts might be dutifully recorded in the state’s black books.
But even when George Orwell famously tried to imagine
a dystopian world with no privacy, state supervision went
no further than the boundaries of the mind itself. Orwell’s
1984 portrayed a genuine, horrifying possibility, but for all
the talk about Big Brother and brainwashing, the idea of
literally invading another’s consciousness still seemed no
more than fantasy. After all, although the idea of a right
to privacy may be recent, the impenetrability to others of
the inner life is as old as the mind, part of the unthinking
background to human life.
The privacy of the inner life may be as old as the mind—
but perhaps its days are numbered. Recent advances in brain
imaging technology perhaps begin to raise the possibility
that at some future point there will exist “brain reading”
technology that could reveal what is silently contemplated
in the recesses of the mind, requiring us to literally give
legal status to thoughts, emotions, and sensations. To be
sure, brain imaging is still in its infancy. But neuroscience
has already begun to map the neural correlates of our inner
life. Research is underway to identify the neural signature
of lying, to tell which of several intentions is chosen,
and to identify the objective correlates of the subjective
experience of pain. We do not yet know the empirical limits
of neuroimaging, but philosophers already can and should
raise general questions about the conceptual and ethical
limits of neuroimaging.
One set of questions comes from the philosophy of
mind. Is it even coherent to talk about “brain reading”—
about peering into another’s stream of consciousness by
scanning their brain? What conception of the mind does this
presuppose, and is this conception philosophically sound?
We need to resist the temptation of a misleading Cartesian
conception of the mind as at once completely transparent
to self and utterly impenetrable to others. This conception
overlooks the intimate conceptual tie between the innerand the outer: our concept of the mental is such that it is of
the very essence of thoughts and feelings that they can be
expressed in public words and deeds. What we know about
others on the basis of their behaviour is not merely “second
best” knowledge, let alone mere conjecture—indeed, we
often know others better than they know themselves.
It is thus a mistake to think of the inner as a “Cartesian
theatre”—to borrow Daniel Dennett’s phrase in Consciousness
Explained—to which others have no entry but that we
ourselves can infallibly perceive from a distance of zero.
As much recent philosophy of mind has taught us, a given
mental state has a particular content—is about someone
or something—only through its systematic interrelations
with other mental states and with complex patterns of
dispositions to behaviour. And philosophers of mind have
further taught us that our minds’ contents might be partly
constituted by our relations to our external environment
or a certain community. Indeed, this counter-Cartesian
conception of the mind might make it seem confused
to even think that we could ever know what is in a mind
simply by peering into someone’s brain. This is one way of
interpreting Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remark in Philosophical
Investigations that “[i]f God had looked into our minds
he would not have been able to see there whom we were
speaking of”. If God couldn’t see this by peering into
consciousness itself (whatever that means), wouldn’t it be
complete confusion to think that we could do better by
looking at patterns of brain activation? But this, I think,
goes one step too far. The idea of “brain reading”, however
diffi cult to realise empirically, is actually conceptually
modest. It does not presuppose that thoughts and feelings
are just neural processes with “contents” that can be read
by simple inspection. The contents of our inner thoughts
may, indeed, be no more transparent than words sincerely
written down in a diary, but this hardly means that they
would be more opaque. In interpreting the deliverances of
“brain reading”, we will be able to know what another is
thinking in the usual way that we can know what another
is saying—by taking for granted a certain set of background
beliefs and desires, by relying on context, and by assuming
certain connections to the natural or social environment.
Wittgenstein’s remark is not, I think, best understood as
a denial of God’s omniscience. It is a denial that God could
know the content of a thought just by peering into a mind.
But that is not a problem, since God would presumably also
know whatever else is relevant to determining its content.
And although we will usually know less, we will almost
always know enough.
I doubt that conceptual arguments about the nature of
mind can somehow magically rule out the possibility that
neuroimaging will one day make the inner transparent to
others. And this takes us to a second, ethical set of questions.
When I consider a future in which our minds would be
exposed to others, my fi rst reaction is horror. If others were
able to directly inspect my thoughts and feelings, wouldn’t
I be completely exposed and vulnerable, mentally naked?
However, such reactions to possible technological changes
are not yet moral arguments. In the past they have often been
badly mistaken: windmills weren’t instruments of Satan,
as William Blake had feared in Jerusalem. Would invasion of
our stream of consciousness really be of an entirely diff erent
moral order than more familiar threats to privacy? Moreover,
is there a deep moral diff erence between wiretapping and
“mindtapping”, between browsing someone’s private diary
and peeping into her brain? Not everyone thinks there need
be a deep diff erence. Wittgenstein again serves as our foil
when he remarks, in Philosophical Investigations, that “[o]nly
God sees the most secret thoughts. But why should these be
all that important? Some are important, not all. And need all
human beings count them as important?”
On refl ection, it does seem that what matters for privacy is
whether others know something personal about oneself, not
how they came to know it. Psychologists have shown that
many of our passing feelings are almost invariably expressed
in facial micro-expressions that we do not notice, but which
can, with training, be detected. Would it really morally
matter whether I found out about your hopes and doubts by
inspecting your brain or by tracking your micro-expressions?
The diff erence between the two may only be a diff erence of
degree, not of kind. Still, we should not underestimate its
ethical signifi cance: it might be a vast diff erence of degree.
It is only a contingent fact that our inner lives are
impenetrable to others, but this is a truly profound
contingency, deeply embedded in our form of life,
and although a world in which the mind is completely
transparent is very distant, we should at least begin to
refl ect on what would be lost in such a world. Much might
be gained: imagine a world with little, or even no, lying and
deceit; a world in which there would never be an excuse
for torture. This thought is not really a new one. In one of
Aesop’s fables, Momus criticises Jupiter because “he had not
placed the heart of man on the outside, that everyone might
read the thoughts of the evil disposed and take precautions
against the intended mischief”. Immanuel Kant somewhere
speculates that “on another planet there might be rational
beings who could not think in any other way but aloud. These
beings would not be able to have thoughts without voicing
them at the same time, whether they be awake or asleep,
whether in the company of others or alone.” Kant then asks
“In what kind of different behaviour toward others would this
result, and what kind of eff ect would it have in comparison
with our human species?” As neuroscience advances, this
might become a question about our own future.
www.thelancet.com Vol 371 May 10, 2008
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