The great advances in research in the area of the brain and neurosciences, while making possible significant improvements in people’s quality of life, also suggest that there is a growing and serious risk of control and manipulation of personal abilities, hence it is very relevant to start talking about Neurorights.
I will refer first to abilities that may be in jeopardy in the coming years, in the nearer future than we sometimes believe, and then to abilities that are already in jeopardy as a result of advances in neuroscience in the coming years. that we are already immersed
Among these capacities that are at risk of being manipulated, I would point out, at least, the following:
- Right to own sensory perceptions. Because they are the gateway to reality. And through virtual reality an enormous field of manipulation opens up. These sense perceptions cannot be altered without the person’s authorization. Without control of one’s own perceptions, there can be no freedom to evaluate reality and decide how we want to live. If someone has impaired vision or hearing, they will have less freedom to decide what they want to do. We can alter perceptions, for example, with alcohol, but it must be by our own decision. We know very well that the human capacity for perception is limited and is subject to certain errors, for example when seeing silhouettes and figures, as shown by cognitive psychology. These limitations are linked to the characteristics of evolutionary history.
2. Right to memory and one’s own memories, which are a fundamental part of our identity. Our history defines and shapes us. This right to one’s own memories is also the right to negative memories that have been part of the experiences that are part of our history. Moreover, even traumatic memories, except in special cases, it is very delicate to modify them due to the risk of losing one’s own identity, one’s own narrative of personal history. Most people have resilience, the ability to overcome trauma, because trauma is not the same as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (as I have already pointed out in other articles on this blog). In any case, it would be the person himself who could consider deleting some memories due to their very negative nature, although even in this case, the option of increasing the ability to integrate them could be considered as something better than deleting them.
3. Right to reasoning capacity. The reason is a quality control of the mind that allows us to correct the statements formulated by emotions that are automatic responses and are easy to manipulate. As Kant already stated, our ability to know and analyze reality is limited by how our senses work, all that remains is that, as I have pointed out in the first section, this perceptive capacity is limited.
The rights that are already altered are:
3. To control one’s own emotions. This control is already heavily manipulated by advertising, for example, and in today’s society, by social networks, but it is not easy to regulate it because there is also the right for each person to express themselves and it is difficult to point out the limits of seduction or handling
2. -freedom of movement: today there are controls everywhere. Our image is collected countless times every day without any authorization from us. The Guardian recently published an investigation showing that the London home of George Orwell, the author of 1984, was surrounded by more than 20 control cameras! It was not too different from what Orwell imagined as a nightmare in the famous novel, it could be even worse than what you imagined
3. Privacy. We go from scandal to scandal about what is done with our personal data that is sold, used to condition and manipulate us…..Although unfortunately we are still far from being aware that many times we ourselves are the ones who authorize or do not protect our privacy
So we have a challenge ahead of us, a new battle in defense of human rights: neurorights. Because as a joke from Roto recently showed, we can find that we have entered the world of virtual reality but we don’t know how to get out.
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