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S. Orestis Palermos, "Cyborg Rights: Extending Cognition, Ethics, and the Law" (Routledge, 2025)
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A
Well I was down on my last dollar Then I started saving cause the bank said fiscal restraint is what you're craving so I put my earnings in a high yield account Let the savings compound and the interest mount I'm optimizing cash flow putting debt in check now time is my friend and not a pain in the neck and we've got a little cash to rebuild the old deck Boring money moves make kinda lame songs but they sound pretty sweet to your wallet BNC bank brilliantly boring since 1865 introducing Meta Ray Ban display the world's most advanced AI glasses with a full color display built into the lens of the glasses. It's there when you need it and gone when you don't. Send and receive messages, translate or caption live conversations, collaborate with Meta AI and more. Be one of the first to try Meta Ray ban display. Visit meta.com metaraybanddisplay to book a demo and find your pair this is a real good story about Bronx and his dad, Ryan, Real United Airlines customers. We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Captain Andrew.
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B
I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.
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A
That's Andrew, a real United pilot.
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B
These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain.
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A
Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever.
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B
That's how good Leads the way welcome.
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A
To the New Books Network.
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B
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talese and Sarah Tyson. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Orestes Palermos, Assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Ioannina. His new book, Cyborg Extending Cognition, Ethics, and the Law, is just out from Routledge. Until recently, no one could access the detailed contents of your mind directly, the way only you can. This level of protection of our mental data was guaranteed by the way we are built biologically and it can no longer be taken for granted. In his new book, Palermos considers the ethical and legal implications of the Extended Mind thesis, the idea that information processing technologies are not merely tools, but are literally parts of our minds. While the thesis remains controversial, there is little doubt that technological devices can push information that coheres in an integrated way with your thoughts. For example, when your phone presents photographs of last year's holiday on today's anniversary. Such mind extensions create new vulnerabilities to invasions of mental privacy, freedom of thought, and protection from personal assault. Palermos articulates these new problems and explores what levels of protection we might adopt in the face of them, up to the point of making it technologically impossible to access or manipulate your extended mental contents. Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Orestes Palermos. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
- [03:36]
C
Hi. Hello. Thank you very much for having me.
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B
I'm very interested in talking with you about your book. Cyborg writes. It's very, very current topic here, both in terms of philosophy of mind, but also in terms of. Of the potential, you know, extensions of our mind and the very unique and interesting sorts of ethical as well as legal issues that arise, you know, because of these technologies and their integration in our lives. So before we get to the actual topic or content of the book, can you say a bit about yourself, you know, how you became a philosopher omen and how this book came about?
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C
Sure, of course. I guess my story is similar to most academic philosophers. I was quite curious about what this is we're experiencing, is who we are, what our purpose is supposed to be. You know, these grand philosophical questions. As a kid, I was very curious. I never thought about becoming a philosopher while I was growing up. I actually have a background in chemical engineering. However, you know, through my studies in engineering, I didn't quite feel I was getting to the answers or even the questions that I was mostly interested in. So then I switched from engineering to philosophy of science, and then I went into epistemology. I did my master's, I did a PhD. And so, you know, gradually I. I became a. An academic philosopher without even realizing. But I. I consider myself to be quite lucky to. To be able and practice this occupation. About this book, I guess I was always interested in the extended mind thesis from Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. I mostly was interested in the extended mind thesis in relation to epistemology, how extension technologies may allow us to know more and under what conditions that might be the case. But at some point I also started thinking about some of the ethical issues that might come up when we think about the possibility that our minds are not just confined within our bodies. And so the first contact I had with this topic was with a paper that I co authored with Adam Carter from the University of Glasgow, where we started wondering whether perhaps having your laptop or some Kind of other extension technology intentionally compromised by a third party would not just be a damage to your property, but perhaps something far more serious like assault. And so I started thinking this topic. Then we published the paper, we had a great fun, right meat. Then I kind of stopped working on this issues for a little while. But I think that in the background of my mind there were deep coming up. And so then from the possibility of extended assault, I started wondering about the possibility of having someone reading your mind by scrutinizing your extension technology. So the issue of extended mental privacy started bothering me and how we could perhaps think about it. Then I realized that there was another issue with mental integrity and whether people could actually manipulate us in very powerful ways just by meddling with our extension technologies. And as I was thinking about these issues and started writing about them, I also figured that there was a growing literature in neuroethics that was focusing on similar topics, but with respect to neurotechnologies, mostly imaging technologies like Fmris. And so I realized that there was a whole philosophical ecosystem that I could tap into to expand on the ethical and legal questions that come up with regards to extension technologies. And so I thought there is enough material for a book on the topic. Also, at the same time, new technologies started presenting themselves like brain computer interfaces and neuralinks implantable chip that allows individuals to control computers just with their thought. And so I, I came to see that this is not just a theoretical topic, but actually it's a practical one. And perhaps it's important to start taking it seriously.
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B
Okay, so. So I guess the, the first thing really is when you talk, you know, extensive technology and, and you know, extended mind, Extending cognition as part of the subtitle. So first, you know, what do you, what do you mean by that? What is, what is on your view, the extended mind? What is a cyborg for you?
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C
Yeah, well, the short answer is that to say that someone's mind can extend is to say that basically they are a cyborg, a cybernetic organism, which roughly describes entities that are part organic, part machine in various combinations. We are all accustomed to them from science fiction books and movies. And I guess it is not something that we deem as an implausible possibility. But the interesting thing is that the very same idea is also explored within philosophy of mind and cognitive science over the last two decades, perhaps even more. And it is the idea that sometimes our minds could extend beyond our biological boundaries to include some of the technologies that we heavily interact with. These could be low tech technologies like pen and Paper when we solve a complex mathematical problem. But they could also be very advanced technologies, such as implantable neural chips. Now there are several ways to understand how individuals can become cyborgs. I guess there are various levels to that. For instance, if we follow the theory from philosophy of mind in the first place, we have the possibility of extended cognition, which basically describes the idea that sometimes the technologies we employ, they could extend some of our more basic cognitive functions, such as perception, or the ability to perform arithmetic calculations, like the example I gave you with pen and paper, or the way blind individuals can perceive the world by using the cane. And there is also this very interesting high tech analog of the cane, which is known as a tactile visual substitution system, which basically consists of a pair of sunglasses that have attached on them a mini video camera that then converts the visual input it receives into tactile stimulation on individuals skin. And the individuals, by moving around and affecting the visual input that the camera receives, then affect the sensations they have on their skin, which then affects the way they move around and so on and so forth in this kind of cycle. And eventually those individuals manage to quasi visually perceive the world. So the idea here is that we have this extended ability to quasi visually perceive the environment that does not belong to either the blind person nor the machine that they interact with, but rather to their biotechnological union. So these would be instances of extended cognition. So let's say that would be the first level of becoming a cyborg. But then the, there is the notion of extended minds, which claims that it's not just lower level cognitive processes that may extend beyond our organisms, but even higher level mental states or mental capacities like the capacity to form beliefs, to remember stuff. And so in this case we are thinking about individuals that use technologies to perform things that we would normally describe as mental capacities. So the one example here, for instance, is to use some kind of equipment to write down notes for your future self and then go back to those notes and in this way extend or enhance your capacity to remember things. So I guess these are two ways of describing theoretically what being a cyborg might amount to.
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B
Okay, so let me, let me ask, because one of the points you make in the book is the conditional nature. And I understood that as you know, if the mind is extended, then these are some of the consequences. And I was interested in sort of probing that framing a bit, because one of the things I was wondering, I mean, you just sort of said, you know, these extend or enhance. And there's a big debate in philosophy of mind of whether the mind is actually extended, or whether or cognition is extended, or whether it's just that we have used these things for enhanced capacities. And we don't need to rehash that debate. It's its own thing in philosophy of mind. But I suppose the issue for the book is, and for readers and listeners is to what extent do the do the new ethical and legal issues that arise depend on one embracing the extended mind thesis? Or are these still issues regardless of whether you embrace that thesis or not?
- [16:02]
C
Yeah, that is a good question, which makes one wonder why. Why have all these metaphysical commitments in place and discuss in these terms when we can just think about the way technologies may affect people and just consider these from a practical perspective. However, I do think that the argument first of all can be made much stronger if we can also make sense of what we're talking about from the point of view of metaphysics. So just to explain quickly what I mean by this, one of the ethical consequences of the extended mind faces is the possibility of extended assault. Now, what this means is that if someone, for instance, intentionally damages another person's tactile visual substitution system, have they just damaged the property or have they assaulted them, legally speaking, what is it that they've done to them? What is the wrong? And here, if we want to claim that no, this is not just property damage, but it is a form of assault, and we are talking about a completely different category of wrongdoing, then we better have a good reason for explaining why it's not just property damage anymore. And here, if we accept the extending mind thesis or the hypothesis of extended cognition, depending on what artifact we're talking about, we can make a much stronger case for the claim that it is actually a form of assault. So basically the idea here is that, you know, you cannot have ethics, let alone some kind of legal scholarship, without metaphysics, because otherwise there's not going to be much stable ground for claiming that. Now we need to actually have some very specific changes, both in the way we think about moral issues, but also in the kind of laws that we try to perhaps change or introduce new ones.
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B
Okay, good. Yeah, go ahead.
- [18:41]
C
Well, I could just be giving you more examples of these. So, for instance, there is also the issue of mental privacy.
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B
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B
Experian. Right. I was going to ask about that next. So you, you argue about that there's new threats. I mean, that's the sort of thrust of the book, is that if these devices and so forth are considered parts of our minds and not just like property or external things, right. That we leverage to think better, then certain, you know, new forms, either new threats or new forms of old threats arise. And one of these was, of course, the idea of mental privacy. So could you explain how the thesis changes that idea? I mean, we already, we already have, we have certain privacy protections, you know, and people talk a lot about, you know, privacy of our personal data, which is related but not the same thing. But our minds are generally assumed to be inaccessible, only directly accessible to ourselves. And if the mind is extended in the ways that you envision, then our minds are directly accessible by other people.
- [21:49]
C
Right. So, and this is a complicated issue that depends on very many variables and what might count as mental content rather than just data. But to try and explain as simply as I can, the main idea is what you mentioned, that so far no one could actually access my mental contents in the same way that I access them. So no one could see the detailed thoughts, beliefs, desires that I have. I could. And they could only know about them if I would force them mainly through communication, perhaps sometimes in very specific settings, they could infer them from my behavior. But then again, they wouldn't have the full first person access that I have to those beliefs, desires and thoughts and so having this extent of access to another person's mind was out of the question. No one could actually see what I'm thinking. No one could experience my memories in the same way that I experienced them when I have them. However, now, if the extending mind thesis is correct, which amounts to saying that some of my beliefs, or in general mental contents, extend beyond my biological machinery, so, for instance, my brain, and they bleed out to some of the technological equipment that I carry around me on a daily basis, for instance, my phone, then someone could potentially access those beliefs or memories or even desires. For instance, they could see what I have on my basket lists on Amazon. They could access them and know exactly what it is that I'm thinking or what my memories are in the full detail and the full extent, or at least in a very big extent, much bigger than just trying to infer what I'm thinking. And so this now presents a vulnerability that wasn't possible a few years ago, right? And if someone can know your detailed thoughts and beliefs or desires, then obviously they could also manipulate you in a very surgical manner. And so this is why it is worrisome to think that perhaps someone could actually access my mind just by accessing my gadgets. Now, someone might say, well, no, these are not real mental contents. However, it all depends on whether those contents are stored on a device that has been integrated to our cognitive system, mainly by interacting with it in a very dense way, and also whether those contents are in some sense informationally integrated, meaning that they get updated and they can change along with other aspects of my cognitive system. You know, sometimes when I have one belief about the weather and then I receive a notification on my phone, or I watch the news and the weather report, then automatically, without even thinking about it, this new incoming information from the external world might change what I was previously thinking about the weather. And so you get this dynamicity, this informational integration of the contents of within our heads, which is very important and in a sense, perhaps a necessary feature to call something a mental content, as opposed to a mere piece of information that sits there in the background of your mind. And the question now is, okay, are those data which are stored on my gadgets informationally integrated in a way that is similar to the way the information in my head is informationally integrated, otherwise, you know, if they miss this very important feature, you cannot literally say that they are aspects of your mind. And the important. And the. The interesting thing is that perhaps so far this was not the case. Um, our data that were stored on our devices were static they were not integrated with the rest of our cognitive system. But this has started changing. For instance, many of our smartphones now with the help of AI, they kind of draw connections between the different pieces of information that are stored on them in interesting ways. And then they push notification to our, to, to us or photo memories that might be connected to the place that we find ourselves in or who we happen to talk on the phone or who were with for coffee. And so you kind of get this effect where suddenly the, the external device pushes you information that coheres with your context in a manner that makes them seem informationally integrated, at least to some significant extent. And so this kind of data now starts feeling slowly but steadily a little bit more like our memories. And I guess, you know, as technologies progress and AI is used even more to draw connections between the data and our phones and it learns from us, and maybe it learns to push data depending on how often we use them. Or then if we don't use them often enough, they tend to just, you know, be pushed back in the background of our phone so they don't normally come up. You know, it starts feeling a little bit like biological memory. Okay. And so the worry is that if that's the case now or in the near future, then we should be careful about how we protect this kind of data. Because so far our mental contents were inaccessible by third parties in their full detail, whereas now some of our mental contents, if the data stored on our phones qualify as mental contents, will actually be accessible by third parties. And so again, it is important to have good reasons for making a good case that this information is not just data. It's not just personal data. It's not just metadata, which is basically information about ourselves or information about the information about ourselves. But instead it is data that is metaphysically on a par with the contents within our heads. If we can make a good case, metaphysical case for this claim, then it's easier to go on and claim that, look, we need to be very careful about how we design those technologies so that perhaps the access to them will pay the similar to the access that we have to the contents of our minds. So basically that we have exclusive access to them and no one else unless we consent. And there is also how we design respective laws, how we come up with laws that we protect the those data.
- [30:42]
B
Right. So let me, let me. So it, I mean, it sounds like the fundamental issue is the technologies are, it's not so much extensive technology, but intrusive technology where, you know, the, there's intrusion, I Mean, this kind of goes to your chapter on mental intent integrity. I mean, it sounds like the problem is not, you know, well, if our minds are extended, then you get these new legal problems. It's more like we're being manipulated or forced into, you know, either extensions or it's intrusions, for sure. And the problem is that there's no. We're not sure. Maybe we don't know how, or maybe we're not thinking properly about the technology as intrusive in that way. And that that's where the problem lies.
- [31:54]
C
That's partly where the problem lies. I agree. Because in a way, we are bleeding in those technologies if the extended mind thesis is true. And so it makes it much easier for others to, well, basically disrespect our mental boundaries. It actually makes it possible to disrespect our mental boundaries in ways that so far, it wasn't possible. People couldn't actually read my mind, not in its full detail. Well, and that's one issue, especially when it comes to technologies for mental extension. However, there are also a bunch of technologies for cognitive extension which would not be considered intrusive in the same way. So, for instance, it could be a bionic limb that is controlled by a neural implant just with the power of our thoughts, for instance. That's one of the technologies that neuralink is trying to develop. There doesn't seem to be much of an intrusion. And still it seems that this kind of technology should be protected more than just our mere property. I think that. I think there was another point that you mentioned.
- [33:22]
B
Maybe it was just the. Well, I think you've addressed the, you know, the idea that maybe we should be thinking of this as intrusive rather than extensive.
- [33:33]
C
Yeah, well, it is both, I guess. Every. Every kind of technology that we heavily rely to exposes. Exposes us to certain dangers, either from the way we use it or from the ways others might disrupt that technology. The thing here that is important is that actually those technologies are not mere tools. They're not just props, however, they're aspects of our person, perhaps, or our minds. And so suddenly the status of those objects becomes much more important for us in a way that could potentially justify thinking about introducing new laws or reinterpreting existing ones in order to keep things as safe as they used to be when our minds couldn't extend.
- [34:34]
B
Right.
- [34:35]
A
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- [35:03]
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The.
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- [36:03]
B
Right, so let me. There's so many questions. So if I guess then the question is, whose responsibility is it to protect our mental integrity? Because I can choose. I still have. Nobody is forcing me to extend my mind. I can keep a flip phone or even just a landline and I can use a computer but never do anything that might remotely extend my mind. And I'm protected completely. And it seems like I have that choice. I'm not being forced into mental extension or cognitive extension. And somebody who is particularly those companies making money from pushing stuff at us, you know, in all our, you know, social media feeds and all that, all that stuff, they might very well say, well, if you don't want it, just, just don't sign up for it. You know, don't, don't be on TikTok. Don't, you know, don't engage in it. But for those people who don't have a problem with it, you know, we're making their lives, you know, whatever they think, you know, better, more integrated. I don't know. So, so, so who's, so where does the. If, you know, we still have the freedom, I guess is, is what I'm saying, to have to, to avoid these problems. Mental extension is not, we're not being forced into it. And so if that's the case, then where exactly should we be implementing new sorts of laws or modifying old laws to protect like freedom of thought? Right.
- [38:14]
C
Yeah, yeah. I'm afraid that this kind of freedom of choosing what kind of technologies we are going to employ is an illusion. So, and I would like to explain this by first thinking about our terms. Let's say the common people who use technologies just to make their lives easier. But then we should also think about people with disabilities who actually employ technologies like these to restore certain functionalities. So who might not even have the illusion of freedom that we may have. So, you know, I don't think that, I mean, thinking about most people first, I don't think that anyone could easily find a job right now if they didn't know how to operate a smartphone. And so if you really want to be in western society and participate in public life, probably you are not as free as it may seem to employ or not employ this kind of technology. So one way or the other, we are all pushed or made to use this kind of technologies. And the more they become normalized, the more they become of an expectation by employers or even the educational system, then, you know, the, the choice is not there anymore. So we don't really have freedom in this way unless we somehow decide to just give everything up and just go live in the mountains on our own. And then, you know, you get people who actually need those technologies to be able and match the functionalities that other most individuals display in society. So, for instance, there is this neural implant that allows or used to allow individuals to be able to predict some kind of epileptic seizure and then administer themselves a prophylactic medication. So, you know, and actually there is a study on a specific patient r about this who, you know, had chronic epilepsy for most of the life. And then at some point there was this company, Neurovista, who made this neural implant that allowed them to predict the eclectic seizures and be able to manage them. And so she went on a trial for this implant. And after the implantations, she started experiencing an improvement on the quality of her lives. He could go out, she could see friends without worrying about what is going to happen, whether she's going to have an epileptic seizure and so on. And overall she expressed that, you know, she and the machine kind of became one and developed new abilities that before the implantation they were just not there. And so at some point, even though things were seemed to be going great for financial reasons, that NeuroVista company had to discontinue the trial. And they demanded that the implant be explanted. And unfortunately, patient R seems that had no other choice than to give back the piece of equipment, even though she actually made several appeals to not have it mandatorily explanted. So, you know, thinking about what this kind of object represented for her, not just representing whether it was actually part of herself, of her person, and then what kind of legal consequences might exist is very important for some people who might not look like a free choice to integrate with those technologies. In this case, for instance, this is just a property that belongs to the company, and so the company can ask for the piece of equipment that it be returned, or has it become part of her mind and her person, such that it's entirely out of the question to demand that this technology be returned. And so again, we see how the way we think about the metaphysical status of these objects might make a huge difference with regards to both our intuitions and the way we practically treat them. And so, to return to your question, I think that this is an issue for all. It is, of course, something that we need to carefully consider every time we decide to merge with technologies. We need to think about the technology to see whether we want to be exposed to certain vulnerabilities that might not be obvious in the first instance. For instance, having to return the technology mandatorily or potentially having our minds read or being manipulated in ways that otherwise would not be possible. So this is one of the aims of the book, to let leaders know what might be at stake. And the book doesn't. And I mean, I personally do not want to say that, look, we need to do this. This is the right thing to do. This is the way to go. Mainly because I don't really have the answer to it because so many factors might affect our choices in the end, and we can talk about this later on. The aim is to see what, what those factors might be without weighing them, because this is something that needs to happen, I think, on the basis of a public debate that then both legal scholars and law experts as well as people who design those technologies, need to take into consideration when they create new policies or they design new technologies.
- [46:00]
B
Okay, good. So let me. So it's, you know, it's interesting because when the Extended Mind thesis was first put forward in 94, I think, or.
- [46:13]
C
95, it was 98.
- [46:18]
B
Somewhere, you know, in the Dark Ages. And, you know, it was, it's always been this sort of exciting, new, innovative, you know, paradigm breaking sort of thesis. And it seems like there's kind of A lot of unintended consequences here, where if you think it's true, it's actually a horrible thing. And something that you suggest as one of the options for dealing with these new vulnerabilities is to. And again, as you just mentioned, you're not promoting one particular response. You're sort of laying out the problems and potential answers. But one of the answers that you do propose as an option is to aim for technologically impossible to access under all circumstances. So your privacy protection should extend to not just restriction, but actually technologically impossible. And then your protections of your thought, again, not just like your speech, is protected, but actually it's impossible to manipulate your thought under all circumstances. So can you say a bit about that extreme and you know those extreme sorts of options that you have for responding to what is apparently a really severe downside to the whole thesis?
- [48:07]
C
Yeah. Well, the thesis should not. The validity of the thesis should not depend on how dark the consequences might be. But, but the way we try to implement those technologies and integrate with them might depend on whether the thesis is valid. So, for instance, say that we accept the C thesis, and this is part of what you mentioned before, that the condition, the discussion is conditional because, you know, there is no proof that the extended mind thesis is correct or the hypothesis of extended cognition is correct, although I could argue that they have. They stand very good chances to be correct. So say, say, say that they are correct. Now, for argument's sake, then we start having those worries about an assault on not just our privacy, but our mental privacy, and we might have an assault on our mental integrity. In other words, having others manipulating our beliefs, desires, and thoughts without actually trying to communicate with us, but bypassing our cognitive systems and just changing physical aspects of our extended minds. So basically deleting mental data or inserting new ones so that they can cause some kind of disorientation or intended effect. Now the question is, if that's the kind of threat that we worry about. We should compare with how the situation was before. Those new technologies would allow for this kind of mental extension. And we will come to realize that, broadly speaking, our minds were impenetrable in their full, deep, in their full detail. And others could not actually directly manipulate our thoughts. They could only change our minds by arguing with us, or perhaps through education or some kind of propaganda. But everything so far could be filtered out by some of our cognitive functions. Now, this is not possible anymore. So someone could just affect the way I'm thinking just by meddling with the hardware on my extension technologies. Is this something that we want to allow? One option here is to say, no, this should be illegal, and it should never be lawful. So we could have laws that say that you could never access someone's data that are stored on devices that are considered to be cognitive extensions or mental extensions. You should never try and manipulate those data. Why? Because. Because they're not just data or metadata. They're actually mental data. These digitally stored in pieces of information belong to someone's mind. And so it is a much weightier kind of data category. That's one thing to say, which might sound as a good idea. The thing is, however, that this kind of legal protection cannot match the protection that so far our minds have entertained so far. It wasn't just illegal for others to try and read our minds or try and manipulate our minds in this direct way. So far, that was impossible by nature just because of how we're made up. So someone might say, okay, if we want to match that level of protection that we have been accustomed to, then perhaps legal measures are not sufficient. Perhaps we should design those technologies in a manner that matches that level of protection. In other words, employ certain cryptographic techniques to make it entirely impossible for others to access this information in our mental extensions. And, you know, we could make it impossible to access them under any circumstances, which, as you said, is one of the extremes. Or you could just make it a little bit weaker and say that, no, this kind of access could be possible, but only with the individual's consent, which might be a better idea because, you know, even for medical purposes, perhaps in the future, we would like to allow doctors to access the contents of our extended mines. But it all hinges on whether we want this kind of protection to be in place. Because to say that it has been in place so far, historically speaking, is not to say that it ought to to be in place. Right? That would be some kind of naturalistic fallacy to say that nature made us this way. But that doesn't mean that we should continue being this way. So we need to discuss this, right? Because all these technologies, they create some fascinating potential. For instance, you know, with mental extension and neural implants, we could perhaps even imagine in the not so distant future, people directly communicating their mental contents with each other without even using communication, without even using language. Perhaps you could actually see what I'm experiencing through some kind of wireless implant. And this ability to share thoughts and experiences in their full details with others might be an amazing opportunity for us to be in some kind of distributed cognitive systems where instead of having to Communicate ideas through text or verbal language or whatever other means that we currently have, we could actually speak directly to each other's minds in a much richer way. Is this something that. That is this potential something that perhaps should make us think that we should not be as strict with the way we design those technologies? Perhaps we would like to allow access to others under certain circumstances. And I admit that I don't really know what the answer is. I do have my own intuitions, which perhaps also depend on, on my cultural background, for instance. I do think that psychological individuality or mental integrity, mental autonomy, the dignity of the person to treat them as an autonomous agent, they're all important moral values that we need to sustain. But this is something that I cannot decide on my own. And I don't think that Western society should decide on its own. Especially if we are talking about the introduction of certain rights which are supposed to have some kind of universal validity. Right. So the right to extending mental privacy or the right to extended mental integrity, should we be so absolute about the validity of those rights or should we be more careful and, you know, be open to debate about them and the extent which we want to go in order to protect them?
- [56:27]
B
Right. There's so many interesting questions and we didn't get to like, you know, you know, social media or, you know, manipulation of attention, which is kind of implicit here. There's just so many different ways to go. But unfortunately we are out of time. So I want to wrap with a question about where you're, you know, what's on your horizon right now. I mean, are you working on a follow up to this book or have you turned to something else? What's your desk full of now?
- [57:05]
C
I think I am. Next go into a new topic. I've been thinking a lot about the alignment problem in AI and I think there is a potential there to use virtue ethics to empower some kind of virtuous AI agent. It's something that's been in my mind for a couple of years now. And now that I finished with this book, which did take me a little bit of time, I want to turn to this. But at the same time I think I want to explore some of the issues having to do with the topic of cyber rights, which I don't go into enough detail in this book. So there are a few other rights that we need to consider. Consider the right natural. What's the word? That perhaps over time a certain piece of technology should become part of your person rather than just some kind of property that belongs to someone. Else, which is akin to the problem facing patient R that I mentioned before. So there is. There are questions about whether we should think about being a cyborg as a protective characteristic. Yeah. And there are also questions that have to do a little bit with perhaps feminist theory and the notion of objectification, but also in a way combined with metaphysical or ethical questions having to do with treating others as mere instruments and not as autonomous agents in themselves. Because I actually think that one way of describing the difference between a mere object and something that is part of yourself is to consider whether it is ethically permissible to use that part of the world, part of the external world, that does not belong to some kind of biological agent as a mere tool that they're using, or whether it should be respected as something that being part of their passion. And so I think that the theory of optics could also be something to look in more detail in the future when returning to topics that I cover in this book. So I guess I'm going to be working on more issues on the book, but also new issues on AI alignment.
- [60:02]
B
Well, there's plenty of work to be done there because this is all. It's kind of real time. It's all happening in real time. And. Yeah, but we are out of time, I'm sorry to say. But I do want to wish you best of luck as you continue forward with these topics and with other things that you're working on. And thanks a lot for talking with us about all these issues in your new book.
- [60:37]
C
Thank you very much. I really enjoyed discussing with you.
- [60:40]
B
Okay, bye.
- [60:41]
C
Bye. Bye bye.
- [60:43]
B
You've been listening to an interview with Orestes Palermos, assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ioannina in Greece. We've been talking about his new book, Cyborg Extending Cognition, Ethics and the Law, which is just out from Routledge. I'm Carrie Figdor. This is New Books in Philosophy, a podcast with the New Books Network. I hope you enjoyed the podcast and thank you for listening.