Cognitive Enhancement and the Nature of Selfhood:
Neurofeeback and deep-brain stimulation
The possibility of technology-driven changes in human nature is a subject of heated polemics between transhumanists and bioconservatives. While transhumanists are optimistic about human technological enhancement, their opponents, bioconservatives, criticize attempts to modify human nature as dangerous and morally flawed. Both sides share an unrealistic approach to human technological enhancement as a radical break in history, describing it in either utopian or dystopian terms. Both these approaches fail to notice the fundamental dynamism of the human condition, a process of continuous self-transcendence.
The dynamic character of the human condition is influenced by the human relation to technology, a crucial aspect of which is human agency. Human agency is particularly important in the case of cognitive enhancement. While it aims at empowering human agency, there are concerns whether cognitive enhancement will not undermine human agency.
Another serious challenge to human agency comes from the implications of neuropsychological research, which has fuelled heated debates on the nature of free will and agency (Benjamin Libet & Wegner). Both these challenges to the self-conception of agency claim that non-personal causes underlie conscious agency. In the case of neuroscientific findings the non-personal causes are neural processes which shape our thought and action. In case of cognitive enhancement the non-personal causes are scientific artefacts, designed to optimise the neural processes.
Here I will explore whether one can design the enhancement that empowers agency instead of undermining it, and under which conditions. The underlying concepts of human will, agency and enhancement will be examined so as to link the debate on human cognitive enhancement to the debate on human agency.
An agent appears as a real phenomenon in phenomenology, as a social construct in Foucault’s philosophy, and as neurologically-induced illusion in some neuroscientific approaches. While striving for a comprehensive view of agency, one cannot limit oneself to only one of these approaches at the cost of excluding others, but all of them must be included.
This paper will outline the theory of agency that brings together phenomenology and cognitive-behavioral approach. Today agency is studied from different perspectives, that can be summarized as first-person approach (phenomenology: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty), second-person approach (Foucault), and third-person approach (studies in artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, as Clark).
To reconstruct cognitive agency, one has to restore the link between first-person experience and its neurological correlates. For this we draw on two practices of cognitive enhancement:
A) deep-brain stimulation (initially focuses at the exterior perspective)
B) neurofeedback training (its active element or the control lies in the first-person experience of the trainee)
The two approaches tackle the cognitive process from the two ends – exterior and interior – which provides a chance to reconstruct the cognitive enhancement process and a cognitive agent more completely by comparing them. The two practices will be compared to understand what they signify for the three outlined views on agency. In particular, we shall focus at their interpretation from the following perspectives:
a) Phenomenology
b) Postphenomenology
c) Foucault perspective on the social constitution of agent.
d) A. Clarck’s cognitive approach.
Cognitive process will be considered as having four parameters: interior versus exterior, and collective versus individual. “Interior” is a first-person perspective of phenomenology and second-person approach of hermeneutics. The “exterior” dimension is a view of a rational behavior and brain functioning.
The resulting approach will synthesize the four perspectives in a theory of agency that will account for direct self-conscious experience, intentionality, rational behavior and its neurological correlates, and environment.
