Skip to main content

Cyborg Rights

This post is by Orestis Palermos who is the author of Cyborg Rights: Extending Cognition, Ethics and the Law (Routledge 2025).


Book cover of Cyborg Rights


For most of human history, the privacy and integrity of the mind—its freedom from intrusion and manipulation—has been taken for granted. Dark practices such as torture, brainwashing, or aggressive propaganda have always existed. Yet in times of peace, they were rare, widely condemned, and—except in extreme cases like torture—often possible to resist. That presumption of freedom of thought is now slipping away. 

Cyborg Rights (Routledge) argues that the sanctity of our mental lives could be under serious threat, due to our growing reliance on extension technologies: smartphones, laptops, AI, and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Consider Neuralink’s wireless neural implant, which already allows people to control computers with their thoughts. 

Or imagine the next step: smartphones controlled by BCIs, their outputs displayed through augmented-reality glasses and earbuds. Push further, and you might converse with AI not through a chatbox, but in a kind of inner dialogue, answers popping up on your wearable display or earpiece the moment you silently speak the questions in your mind. These technologies do not belong to science fiction anymore. They are foreseeable integrations of technologies that already exist.

Philosophy of mind and cognitive science refer to such human-technology mergers in terms of the Extended Mind Thesis. The book begins by introducing this idea and by distinguishing between mere tools and genuine extensions of the mind. The key is the presence of ongoing, two-way interaction between human and machine and dynamic informational integration. 

Biological memories, beliefs, and desires constantly stir and update one another in light of new  experiences. When (and only when) technology participates in this kind of fluid interplay, it becomes part of the mind itself. Strikingly, smartphones already display such features: reminders triggered by time and place, apps that generate photo “memories” tied to our context, GPS systems that update our beliefs about where we are.


Orestis Palermos


From here, Cyborg Rights turns to the ethical and legal consequences of our cyborgisation. Three issues stand out. The first is the right to extended mental privacy. If a device or implant contains part of your memory or belief system, hacking it may be equivalent to reading a significant part of your mind in its full detail. 

The second is the right to extended mental integrity. Until now, attempts to influence thought have been indirect, relying on communication or sensory channels. But if extended minds can be altered directly—by deleting or rewriting digital mental contents while entirely bypassing your cognitive defences—mental interference could become disturbingly simple. 

The third is the right of freedom from extended assault. The law traditionally distinguishes between property damage and assault, but that line blurs when the damaged object is part of the self. Destroying a prosthetic or corrupting a neural implant may not be vandalism but a direct attack on the person.

Cyborg Rights argues that we already have the legal and technological resources to address these challenges. What remains unsettled is how we want to go about it. Should privacy be absolute, or overridden for reasons of security? Should companies design systems that make unauthorised access impossible under any circumstances? These are not questions for technologists or lawmakers alone. They are questions for all of us. 

To prepare the ground for this future debate, the book maps how values such as autonomy, dignity, privacy, individuality, and safety come into tension in the face of extension technologies. Our cyborg nature is not a distant possibility. It is here or soon will be. How—or whether—we decide to protect it will shape the future of human freedom.


Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Delusions in the DSM 5

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. How has the definition of delusions changed in the DSM 5? Here are some first impressions. In the DSM-IV (Glossary) delusions were defined as follows: Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.
Read more

Rationalization: Why your intelligence, vigilance and expertise probably don't protect you

Today's post is by Jonathan Ellis , Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Public Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Eric Schwitzgebel , Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. This is the first in a two-part contribution on their paper "Rationalization in Moral and Philosophical thought" in Moral Inferences , eds. J. F. Bonnefon and B. Trémolière (Psychology Press, 2017). We’ve all been there. You’re arguing with someone – about politics, or a policy at work, or about whose turn it is to do the dishes – and they keep finding all kinds of self-serving justifications for their view. When one of their arguments is defeated, rather than rethinking their position they just leap to another argument, then maybe another. They’re rationalizing –coming up with convenient defenses for what they want to believe, rather than responding even-handedly to the points you're making. Yo...
Read more

A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind

Today's post is by  Karen Yan (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) on her recent paper (co-authored with Chuan-Ya Liao), " A co-citation analysis of cross-disciplinarity in the empirically-informed philosophy of mind " ( Synthese 2023). Karen Yan What drives us to write this paper is our curiosity about what it means when philosophers of mind claim their works are informed by empirical evidence and how to assess this quality of empirically-informedness. Building on Knobe’s (2015) quantitative metaphilosophical analyses of empirically-informed philosophy of mind (EIPM), we investigated further how empirically-informed philosophers rely on empirical research and what metaphilosophical lessons to draw from our empirical results.  We utilize scientometric tools and categorization analysis to provide an empirically reliable description of EIPM. Our methodological novelty lies in integrating the co-citation analysis tool with the conceptual resources from the philosoph...
Read more