Technology and the Future of Persons

Futurologists believe that we are on the verge of merging with our technology. Techno-guru Ray Kurzweil has predicted that, by the 2020s, we will have reverse-engineered the entire brain, and nanobots will be operating our consciousness (Kurzweil 2005). But we need not venture into the world of science fiction to be staggered by the accelerating pace of technology today. We have already become familiar with cochlear implants that, by stimulating the auditory nerve, allow babies born deaf to hear; and we know something about computer-chip-sized devices that can take brain signals and route them to robotic limbs, thereby allowing amputees' thoughts to control their movement. We are nearing the development of retinal implants to treat blindness. I have just read about research at the University of Florida on a new kind of neural implant that does not just receive instructions, but learns along with the brain (Unattributed 2008).Here are a few more examples: Scientists at the University of Michigan are working with neural interfaces coated with an electrically conductive polymer that can be coaxed to integrate with brain tissue, thereby lessening the tissue damage caused by medical implants (Singer 2008). An article in Technology Review explains thatthe goal is to get the electrodes to fully integrate with tissue by growing the coating after the electrode is implanted. The idea is that the polymer's hairlike fingers would reach into the tissue, extending beyond the dead zone surrounding the metal electrodes. 'Imagine the cells are like M&Ms suspended in Jell-O,' says [one of the Michigan scientists]. 'We're growing the polymer around the M&Ms and through the Jell-O.' So far, the scientists have succeeded in growing the polymer in a piece of muscle tissue and a piece of mouse cortex. (Singer 2008)This research, if successful, will pretty much erase the line between what is organic and what is artifactual (and with it, the philosopher's favorite line between what is mind-independent and what is mind-dependent).1There's more on the horizon. Erik Ramsey suffered a brain-stem stroke that left him totally paralyzed, but completely conscious. He was "locked in," as they say. He could communicate only by moving his eyes up or down, to answer yes or no. A neurologist implanted an electrode in his brain whose wires penetrate the part of the motor cortex that controls the motion of vocal muscles. When Ramsey thinks of making a sound, the implant captures the electrical firing of nearby neurons and transmits their impulses to a computer, which decodes them and produces the sounds. The aim is for Ramsey to communicate his thoughts to a computer that translates them into spoken words. As of a report in Scientific American in November 2008, Ramsey could only make a few simple vowel sounds, but his neurologist believes that he will recover his full range of speech by 2010 (Brown, 2008).As a Practical Realist, what interests me in these examples is that they are real-life cases. They are not merely imagined. We do not have to indulge in long-range prediction or in outre thought experiments about zombies in order to be astonished by the melding of the biological with the nonbiological. And it is no surprise that these technological developments have raised anew the question of what we really are.I want to ask: What's to become of us? Do these dizzying advances presage a future in which persons - traditionally conceived as self-understanding moral and rational agents - have disappeared?1. From Extended Minds to Extended SystemsA number of philosophers have developed theories of what we are that seem congenial to this brave new world. Let's start by considering the so-called 'Extended Mind' thesis (EM), the locus classicus of which is an article of the same name ("The Extended Mind") written jointly by David Chalmers and Andy Clark and published in Analysis in 1998.The extended-mind thesis (EM) is the claim that mentality need not be situated just in the brain, or even within the boundaries of the skin. …