Direct Communication and the Torment of Separateness

This paper is concerned primarily with brain-computer interfaces (BCI) and the potential for harm when we seek more intimate communication and relationships through this emerging technology. Specifically, the theological insight of Thomas Aquinas and the philosophical work of Stanley Cavell are taken up to help us better understand our desire for community, the limitations of that desire, and the psychological violence that follows our crashing up against these limitations. Such violence not only informs the current development of BCI in relation to disability but broader hopes for enhancement.

At the core of BCI is the desire to eliminate the gap between the mind and the external world. By mapping voltage fluctuations induced by the electrical activity of neurons into machine code, engineers aim to translate thoughts into information, to link things inside the mind to things outside the mind. Through such a translation, users of this technology can communicate their will to computers and devices and thus create change in the world. As the technology of BCI becomes more complex, able to pick up on more subtle patterns in electrical activity, then users will be able to communicate more nuanced thoughts and will create changes of increasing magnitudes.

One potential future of this technology is concerned less with gross motor activity and more with the possibility for greater communication between persons. By combining BCIs, a brain-brain interface could be developed to link two minds and, scaled appropriately, even a network of brains. This sort of technological telepathy offers different levels of promise. By purely transmitting text, it already begins to eliminate some of the vagaries of external communication like mishearing someone. With further information, the nuances that come with inflection and body language could be communicated without error or the usual ambiguities. In an ideal form, a complete picture of someone’s mental state (or series of states) could be sent to another, ensuring perfect communication.

This artificial vision resonates with a natural view of human flourishing. For Aquinas, our sociality—our desire and need to be in communion with others—is among the innate features of humanity that are required for our prospering in the world and even ethically required of us. The desire to pursue such technology is understandable. And yet, it is not at all clear that we can accomplish through BCI what we hope to accomplish, that we could link one mind with another. Of course, it is empirically possible to connect our brains, to send electrical signals from one to the other, but could we have perfect communication such that one mind is absolutely certain that it has peered into the other mind?

Although Cavell does not take up such scientific possibilities, his work demonstrates that for every potentiality, we retain the option of skepticism, to avoid what has been communicated clearly to us—that we remain fundamentally separate. This can be for any number of reasons. Perhaps, there was a mechanical failure in the transmission process—a flipped bit or a bug in the programming. Perhaps, there is an oddity in one user’s brain, so that some configuration of data taken from one brain is not equivalent to that same configuration in the other. Or, at bottom, there is always the possibility, Cavell maintains, that one simply refuses to accept what has been communicated. Such an option is never off the table, as two are always separate.

More than being a limitation or failure to accomplish our desire for social connection, I suggest that the illusion of perfect communication that ultimately fails to surmount our basic separateness represents a form of torment. It is torment both for the active user and the passive user, for the one unable to understand and for the one unable to be understood. Again, this is a consequence of our need for sociality; Aquinas recognizes that we suffer in being prevented from  claiming “the desires of the heart” (properly directed), from pursuing the intimacy we desire with others. Cavell narrates this torment differently—most dramatically in rehearsing Othello’s impossible desire to peer into Desdemona’s mind, a desire that eventually leads to his murderous rage—but in any account, it is torment that reflects violence in the soul and violence turned outward.

None of this is to suggest that BCI does not have legitimate application, but it does suggest a tempered approach to the developing technology. First, following Brian Brock’s convincing argument that enhancement technology research often plays on sympathy for disability to defend innovation oriented toward more nefarious ends, we must assess to what extent BCI is actually relieving felt needs and weigh potential goods against foreseeable suffering. Second, we must recognize the limitations of such a technology, even at its best—not only limitations from engineering and scientific setbacks, but the inherent limitations of what devices that connect our brains could even offer. They don’t offer much, and what they do offer may not be pleasant.