Neurotechnological intervention and self agency: neuroethical reflections on the modulation of personal identity via externally controlled motor output
Creators: name: Larrivee, Denis
name: Echarte, Luis
Publisher: name: F1000Research
Year: 2015

description: This paper considers the ethical impact of neurotechnologies that modify personal identity via  the external control of cortical motor output. The feeling of self, i.e., the subjective awareness that we are unique, different from others, and embedded in one’s body, is fundamental to understanding the human mind and to evaluating  individual decisions. Self-agency, on the other hand, understood as the ability to cause our own actions and to initiate our own thoughts (namely, to express voluntary behavior), is likewise fundamental, though distinct from the perception of the self as their source of origin, a perception that has been designated agentic self awareness. Nevertheless, despite their distinction, the perception of self is likely to be closely related to self agency; voluntary actions are typically defined as behavior which is mediated (originated) by self-perceptions or self-representations. In some philosophical and neuroscientific accounts the subjective sense of self is constructed from lived experiences, including personal movement, or thinking,  which are made manifest as ‘judgments’ of self agency. Knowledge comes to the individual in these accounts from interaction with the exterior world as sensory representation, against which the embodiment of self and its expression is framed. The first and most simple feeling of self (<i>self-in-action, </i>also called<i> the experience of agentivity) </i>would emerge in this preliminary scenario, and mental states would ultimately derive from it, i.e.,<i> the self-as-state </i>(Russell, 1996). In the case of motor movements, these features are contextualized by neural mechanisms associated with sensory and motor cortical areas. Motor output commands, for example, designated corollary discharge, are simultaneously dispatched to motor and sensory destinations to prepare the sensory cortex to relate these to consciously executed motor movements. Recent experiments, however, report the output of motor events in a proxy intermediate that are subordinate to a primary, externally executed, source of conscious control, making available to external manipulation, therefore, processes that are associated with the perception of self and self agency. In such cases external sensory knowledge no longer functions to assist in structuring self-knowledge and so makes ambivalent agentic self awareness.  Several outcomes are likely: 1) the external signal source precedes the dispatch of corollary discharge and is interpreted as self initiated,  or 2) the signal arrives after or independent of discharge leading to the perception that one’s body and its movements are foreign. Indeed, clinical cases of executive dysfunction, e.g., cortical blindness and autistic spectrum (Pacherie 1997), display comorbidity with identity disorders, suggesting that processes interfering with self agency broadly impact the sense of agency and personal identity. Furthermore, since emotional feeling is also associated with self representation (Denton 2009, Damasio, 2003) such feelings are also likely to be negatively impacted by the manipulation of self agency, which can result in ambivalent feelings toward the self. We propose that modulation of personal agency is likely to substantially alter self and self agency as well as self valuation, and should be preceded by a clarification of how self agency, personal identity, and self value may be impacted.         <br><br>Russell, J. (1996). Agency: its role in mental development. The psychology Press, Hove.<br>Damasio A. (2003), Feelings of emotion and the self. Ann N Y Acad Sci.1001: 253-61.<br>Denton DA, McKinley MJ, Farrell M, Egan GF. (2009). The role of primordial emotions in the evolutionary origin of consciousness. Conscious Cogn. 18(2):500-14.<br>Pacherie E. Motor-images, self-consciousness, and autism. In Russell J. (ed.) Autism as an Executive Disorder, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 215-255.