Paper short abstract:

Advances in neurotechnology and AI enable a symbiotic cognitive integration called the "hybrid mind". This paper explores the notion of hybrid mind, identifies its unique ontological features, and outlines ethical questions arising from this unprecedented blending of human brain-minds and machines.

Paper long abstract:

Concurrent advances in neurotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI) allow for an increasingly tight integration of the human brain and mind with artificial cognitive systems, blending humans with computing technologies, hence creating a symbiotic integration which I call the "hybrid mind". Although the mind has always been a hybrid faculty, emerging from the interaction of biology, culture (including technological artefacts) and the natural environment, the bidirectional flow of information between human brains and computers is now capable of generating an unprecedented degree of mutual adaptation between the two, hence a symbiotic relationship between human personhood and artificial agency. These technological developments generate critical philosophical and anthropological challenges. These challenges include doubts about the effects of this human-machine integration on the user’s self-perception, awareness and the subjective experience of their own mental contents. Furthermore, this class of human-machine interactions blurs the boundaries of the human mind-body synolon (in the Aristotelian sense), on the one hand, and the computer hardware and software that are functionally integrated with such synolon. The ontological indeterminacy introduced by this dynamic also raises normative ethical questions, such as whether functionally integrated computer technologies should be viewed as parts of the person or as separate artefacts, hence subject to different legal treatment. This paper will explore the notion of "hybrid mind", identify its unique ontological features, and outline the most pressing normative ethical questions arising from this emerging symbiotic relationship between human brain-minds and machines.