Page - 118 - in Cyborg Mind - What Brain–Computer and Mind–Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics

118 • Cyborg Mind their memories are often limited by the amount of information that can be stored. As a result, many are becoming ever more dependent on other means, such as technological devices, to retain their data. The American futurologist Ray Kurzweil even notes that ‘we have already largely outsourced our histori- cal, intellectual, social and personal memories to our devices and the cloud’.72 It has also been suggested that individuals should be entitled to control their emotional life by eliminating or restricting negative emotions, such as guilt, sadness, fear and grief.73 Yet, when such memory chip implants are considered, real conceptual and ethical concerns arise as to their effects on personal identity if an individual wants to forget or remember some memories. For example, it may be possible for memory prosthetics to store information that a patient may not want to keep.74 As already mentioned, memories support the very identity of persons and the way in which they see themselves, which means that any modifica- tion of these memories may result in serious questions being asked by these individuals about who they really are!75 This was the idea behind the 2004 science-fiction film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, directed by the Frenchman Michel Gondry, which tells the story of an estranged couple who sought to erase each other from their memories. Network Intelligence With the development of direct neuronal interfaces, another outcome that may arise is the eventual combination, in some way, of the intelligence of a multiple number of persons in a form of network intelligence or hive mind. This could happen if it was possible for individuals to directly com- municate their thoughts and memories using an interface or if human beings could upload the full contents of their minds and combine them in cyberspace. Though such an outcome should be viewed with considerable scepticism, Kurzweil indicated that humanity could then reach the ‘Singularity’. This is where the intelligence arising from a network of human minds, supported by computers, would lead to advances so rapid that the pace of change would dramatically increase to almost an instant. Kurzweil presents the Singularity as an event taking place at about the year 2045, which is sucking humanity towards itself, much as a black hole sucks in matter and energy.76 He describes this Singularity as a point in time in the future that ‘will represent the culmination of the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human but that transcends our biological roots’. In this world, ‘there will be no distinction . . . between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality’.77 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.