Ethical monitoring of brain-machine interfaces

Examples of applications of bionic devices which go beyond therapeutic use are implantable chips for tracking, such as RFID devices or the Verychip (providing medical record, personal information identity, financial information), female remote control orgasm implant (listed in EGE 2005), remote movement control (Warwick et al. 2003), and artistic use of exoscheletons interfaced to PNS (described in Clark 2003).

Maguire and McGee (1999) go as far as to claim that general adoption by wide groups of people of BMIs will be gradually completed within the next twenty years: “The earliest adopters will be those with a disability who seek a more powerful prosthetic device. The next stage represents the movement from therapy to enhancement. One of the first groups of non-disabled “volunteers” will probably be in the professional military, where the use of an implanted computing and communication device with new interfaces to weapons, information, and communications could be life-saving. The third group of users will probably be people involved in information intensive businesses who will use the technology to develop an expanded information transfer capability”.

The EGE is a group of experts appointed by the European Commission. The task of the Group (see http://​www.​ec.​europa.​eu/​european_​group_​ethics/​index_​en.​htm) is to examine ethical questions arising from science and new technologies, and to issue on this basis Opinions to the European Commission in connection with the preparation and implementation of Community legislation or policies.

This view, which can be traced back to David Hume (1739), is taken up and elaborated on in (Parfit 1984): persons do not exist as entities, centres of experience; they rather exist like nations, or other “artificial” constructs. Parfit challenges the significance usually attached to personal identity, thereby questioning commonly accepted roles for the notion of person in ethical and normative matters, supporting impersonal descriptions of behaviour and the weakening of boundaries among persons.

The notion of person is closely related to the notions of subject of knowledge, unitary self, and personality. There are changes in self-perception, evaluation of one’s own capabilities, character, and mood, which may count as personality alterations. But changes of personality do not necessarily entail changes of personal identity. In connection with BMIs one can ask “Is the personality of the user of a BMIs preserved after interfacing nervous system and machine?”. A negative answer to this question does not entail that personal identity or person persistence through time are altered too.

This view is notably held by Roderick Chisholm in (Chisholm 1976). For a recent reappraisal of antireductionist approaches see Baker (2000).

Input BMI devices include the Auditory Brainstem Implant (ABI), visual cortical devices, and Deep Brain Stimulation implants (DBS). ABI is an auditory prosthesis that bypasses the cochlea and auditory nerve to help people whose auditory nerves are no longer working by means of a direct stimulation of the cochlear nucleus in the brainstem (http://​www.​newmedic.​be). In visual cortical implants the information from a tiny digital camera is transmitted to electrodes implanted in the visual cortex, bypassing the non-working retina or optic nerve, allowing the user to experience localized images of light. Avery Biomedical Devices, and Stony Brook University are developing the implant, which has not yet received FDA approval for human implantation (EGE 2005, p.123). DBS implants are brain pacemakers that stimulate brain areas in order to ease Parkinson’s Disease tremor through a stimulation of the globus pallidus or the subthalamic nucleus in the basil-ganglea region of the brain. Medtronic (http://​www.​medtronic.​com/​) and Advanced Bionics (http://​www.​advancedbionics.​com/​) are commercial names in the emergent market of DBS implants.

Anatomical substitution implants have been developed by T. Berger at the University of Southern California: a neural-silicon hybrid microchip replacing neurons sends signals from one brain cell to another and forms in this way a bridge across damaged or dead brain cells. This device (also known as artificial hippocampus) might help Alzheimer’s patients for restoring memory function. However, its development is limited by the difficulty of finding biocompatible materials for the chips, enabling a stable connection with constantly changing brain tissue. It is hypothesized that future devices may take advantage of nanoscale materials.

The Lockean account is a prominent reductionist approach to the concept of person, often taken up by contemporary philosophers. In this account, an evidential criterion for identifying persons is psychological continuity, and especially mnemonic association among perceptions, actions, and ideas (Locke 1690, II, XXVII). The identity of persons over time is sustained by memory of past experiences, which guarantees psychological continuity with previous “selves”. The memory criterion faces many objections, notably including breaks in the mnemonic link for the same person over time, due to forgetting or amnesia (Hughes 2001 offers a thorough examination of objections to the memory criterion and possible replies). Notwithstanding these objections, the Lockean position has been influential in the philosophical debate about persons, giving rise to a family of different positions. The views that are closer to the original Lockean account have replaced the memory criterion with a broader criterion of psychological continuity. Shoemaker (2005) upholds this position. Arguments against this criterion (Williams 1973) show that psychological continuity cannot be a criterion of personal identity, as it gives rise to paradoxes and charges of circularity. For critical discussion see Berti 2001.

The NMP is “a type of BCI that can guide movement by harnessing the existing neural substrate for that action, that is, neuronal activity patterns in the motor area” (Donoghue 2006).

The symbiosis “level” is another, admittedly more elusive dimension for BMI classification: a BMI controlling, say, a prosthesis is usually regarded as highly symbiotic with the human body, whereas BMIs controlling wheelchairs, mechanical arms, and screen cursors are not. See Micera et al 2006 for extensive discussion of the invasiveness, information flow, and symbiosis classification dimensions.

We forgo here a discussion of input BMIs exerting full external control on a person’s behaviour, whose practical possibility is strongly suggested by bionic examples demonstrating remote controlled rat navigation: “We have used this paradigm to develop a behavioural model in which an experimenter can guide distant animals in a way similar to that used to control “intelligent” robots. […]Our rats were easily guided through pipes and across elevated runways and ledges, and could be instructed to climb, or jump from, any surface that offered sufficient purchase (such as trees). We were also able to guide rats in systematically exploring large, collapsed piles of concrete rubble, and to direct them through environments that they would normally avoid, such brightly lit, open arenas” Talwar et al. 2002.

This approach is called inferential because it is “model-based”, which means that it requires an a priori knowledge of neural activity and the mechanisms of the brain area in which electrodes are implanted. The activity of a whole population of neurons is represented as a vector where each item corresponds to the activity of each neuron. This vector is mapped to a movement vector controlling the robotic artefact. In this approach, the pattern of electric activity is extracted from the brain during movement, and sent to a computer, which produces on this basis some given movement (Micera et al. 2006).

Translation algorithms allow one to recognize some patterns of pre-motor cortex activation classifying them as a kind of primitive movement (ex. extension grip, five finger pinch, lateral pinch, etc.). A robotic controller takes up the task of transforming this information into motor activity (Micera et al. 2006; Andersen 2005).

Clark 2003. In Warwick 2003a one finds the following remark about the silicon chip transponder for identification surgically implanted in his upper left arm: “the biggest surprise for me during the experiment was that I very quickly regarded the implant as being “part of my body”. Indeed this feeling appears to be shared by most people who have a cochlea implant, or heart pacemaker.”