Thought Apprehension: The 'True' Self and The Risks of Mind Reading

摘要

In his article on the ethical issues related to neurotechnological thought apprehension (NTA) in psychiatry, Meynen (2019) highlights relevant concerns and provides a helpful framework to assess the use of such techniques. However, it is important to add a conceptual clarification that has significant consequences on the application of the NTA and on the permissibility of its use. The point is the following: With a sophisticated use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) (or other means of brain imaging), what is really being "read" in our brains? We can currently focus on some cerebral areas and on the brain correlates of specific cognitive processes, but we cannot get a complete "picture" of the ongoing brain activity. We can hypothesize that neurotechnological knowledge and tools will improve in the future and that it will soon be possible to have a finer understanding, at a molecular level, of what happens in our brain moment by moment. However, it does not seem that this should exempt us from addressing some interpretive questions that have important consequences also from an ethical point of view. First, it is necessary to distinguish between the idea of real-time monitoring on one hand, and on the other an analysis of the cerebral activations at the time when the examination is performed, in order to draw from the analysis of those activations a relatively predictive personal and behavioral profile. In the first case, if it were really technically possible to monitor brain activity in real time, NTA techniques could tell us with a fair degree of approximation and with a minimal temporal advance what the agent is about to decide to say or do, often (perhaps in most cases) even before they are aware of it themselves. This would be a highly invasive modality, difficult to recommend from an ethical point of view even in relation to crime prevention, and not particularly useful for other purposes. In the second case, instead, the aim would be to infer from the instrumentally detectable brain activations the inclinations and tendencies of the analyzed subject. In this case, current knowledge and foreseeable technical progress do not seem to put us in a particularly favorable position, if the goal of NTA is to understand how the agent will tend to behave in relation to specific areas of conduct. As shown in the following, in fact, the environmental influence on the one hand and the conscious control on the other seem to reduce the area in relation to which the NTA can tell us something significant.