Page - 21 - in Cyborg Mind - What Brain–Computer and Mind–Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics

Why Use the Term ‘Cyberneuroethics’? • 21 possessed or enjoyed. A medical intervention is considered to be therapeutic when it restores human functioning to species-typical norms or gives abilities integral to the body that are considered to be normal. A therapy thus coun- teracts a known or an anticipated health deficit.47 For example, kidney dialy- sis is a therapy that enables dysfunctional kidneys to filter impurities from the blood in a manner that approximates the properly functioning kidneys of a human being. However, an alteration of the brain that adds forty IQ points would be considered an enhancement if performed on someone who already has a normal IQ.48 This also means that if a society willingly seeks to enhance its members, then what would be considered normal for this community would eventu- ally change. Previously normal traits could even be considered as dysfunc- tional if they no longer attain the new ‘norm’. In such an event, these new dysfunctions could begin to be considered for treatment. Notes 1. Tsien, Engineering Cybernetics, Preface, vii. 2. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 7. 3. Wiener, Cybernetics, 2 4. Ibid., 11. 5. Hook, ‘Cybernetics and Nanotechnology’, 53. 6. Kelly, Out of Control. 7. Clynes and Kline, ‘Cyborgs and Space’. 8. Garner, ‘The Hopeful Cyborg’, 87–88. 9. Brian, God, Persons and Machines. 10. MacKellar and Jones (eds), Chimera’s Children. 11. Graham, Representations of the Post/human, 53, quoted in Messer, Respecting Life, 135. 12. Graham, Representations of the Post/human, 54, quoted in Messer, Respecting Life, 135–36. See also Braidotti, ‘Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt’, 141. 13. Tirosh-Samuelson, ‘Transhumanism as a Secularist Faith’, 713–16. 14. Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs, 3. 15. Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs. 16. Strate, ‘The Varieties of Cyberspace’, 382–83. 17. Thil, ‘March 17, 1948: William Gibson, Father of Cyberspace’. 18. Documentary Film made by Mark Neale: No Maps for These Territories, 2000; Thil, ‘March 17, 1948: William Gibson, Father of Cyberspace’. 19. Graham, ‘Geography/Internet’. 20. Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown, Introduction. 21. Presidential Commission of the Study of Bioethical Issues, Gray Matters. 22. Secretariat of the EGE, European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies to the European Commission, Ethical Aspects of ICT Implants in the Human Body: Opinion No. 20, 5. 23. Presidential Commission of the Study of Bioethical Issues, Gray Matters, vol. 2, 3. 24. Ibid., 104. This open access edition has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.