Brain-Machine Interfacing for Just Peacemaking: examining embodied cognition and transformative communication

Transformative communication practices are not simple exchanges of information. They are wholistically embodied speech-acts that form communicators as moral agents. Speech-act theory of course relies on the work of Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin. Wittgenstein’s work is well-known—the categories of expressivist and referential language are ultimately unintelligible when abstracted from “forms of life.”  Referential, propositional, descriptive language is facilitated and contingent on one’s experiences, context, and tradition. J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory builds on Wittgenstein’s arguments to argue that language is performative, a bodily action of teaching, learning, and requesting rather than about labeling objects.  There is no moral expressivist language absolutely free from lived reality and there is no factual descriptivist account of reality stripped of developed moral reasoning.

Studies in embodied cognition recognize the ways in which congruent information strengthens neurological pathways and “catastrophic” information disrupts and creates new neurological patterns.[1] These patterns sustain our expectations, habits, being, and character. Like many emerging concepts, there is no singular understanding of embodied cognition, but in general, it refers to the idea that cognitive reflection depends on embodied neurological and physiological interactions with the environment. Humans are “metaplastic” creatures or “complex dynamical systems” who “evolve by creating material things and assemblages which scaffold the ecology of our minds and shape the boundaries of our thinking.”  From a neuropsychological perspective, our characteristics as persons depend not on an immaterial inner self or on particular neurons that we possess, but on the neurophysiological patterns formed in interaction with the environment.  Reflecting on the implications of embodied meaning, philosopher Mark Johnson concludes that “Meaning is thus both (1) grounded in our bodily interactions-in the qualities and structures of objective situations; and (2) always social, because it would not exist in its fullness without communicative interactions and shared language, which give us the means of exploring the meaning of things.”

In short, to be meaningful and transformative, to be a “difference that makes a difference,”[2] information depends on the particulars of its embodied communication. Embodied communication between distinct others, with all its limitations and difficulties, is essential for the good formation of good people and good communities.

Communication is a good according to most religions. The ability to connect and exchange information facilitates the work of God. For many liberal theological traditions, this is the primary way God works in the world, through people and their relationships. The love of God is communicated through speech-acts among created beings. Consequently, in the postmodern conext of the Network Society and Information Age, theological interaction with technologies like brain-machine interfaces tends toward an affirmation of enhanced communication. Anything that may enhance our ability to connect honors our created nature as relational beings and the work of God in the world. Theologians generally recognize the importance of embodiment and the importance of embodied autonomy. Jeanine Thweatt, for example, in her influential work Cyborg Selves, pushes theology toward a contextual, compassionate somatic ethic that asks, “what can this body do? And what does this body need?”[3] Theologians affirm embodiment, but what matters about the particularities of embodied information and its flow?

Brain-machine interfaces reframe questions about embodied cognition and require attention to what specifically matters about the form and of information and its communication. Some early studies report that these types of BCI users enjoy “benefits in terms of increased independence and autonomy, experiencing happiness and enjoyment, as well as valuing the opportunity for creativity and self-expression and self-experience. The possibility of social participation and communication was positively rated....”[4] Moral agents, as hoped, may be more able to express themselves and received in communicative relationship with an Other more easily. Most relevant to our conversation here, bi-directional BCI may be used to overcome language barriers to enable direct communication. “[W]hen one brain communicates with another,” Kevin Warwick explains, “there is invariably a high error rate due to the serial form of communication, this being combined with the limited agreement on the meaning of ideas that is the basis of human language. In comparison machines can communicate in parallel, around the world with little/no error…this certainly provides an extremely worthwhile driving force for the research.”[5]

Brain-machine interfaces embody communication in previously unprecedented ways. Theologians (and I say theologians as a matter not as a matter of exclusivity but to avoid superficially lumping religious scholars into one undifferentiated category) and religious ethicists may be well-situated to investigate what kind of support BMI may require in order to promote good formation through embodied communication with its embodied difficulties in the interest of good confrontation. What specifically matters about the form of information and its communication? What may help ensure that the implementation of BMI does not idolize efficiency at the risk of avoiding good confrontation?

[1] Warren S. Brown and Brad D. Strawn, The Physical Nature of Christian Life: Neuroscience, Psychology, and the Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 75.

[2] Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Ballantine Book (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), 462.

[3] Jeanine Thweatt-Bates, Cyborg Selves: A Theological Anthropology of the Posthuman, Ashgate Science and Religion Series (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 160.

[4] Johannes Kögel, Ralf J. Jox, and Orsolya Friedrich, “What Is It like to Use a BCI? – Insights from an Interview Study with Brain-Computer Interface Users,” BMC Medical Ethics 21, no. 1 (January 6, 2020): 2, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-019-0442-2.

[5] Kevin Warwick and Virginie Ruiz, “On Linking Human and Machine Brains,” Neurocomputing, Artificial Neural Networks (ICANN 2006) / Engineering of Intelligent Systems (ICEIS 2006), 71, no. 13–15 (August 2008): 2621, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neucom.2007.06.017.