Page - 174 - in Cyborg Mind - What Brain–Computer and Mind–Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics

174 • Cyborg Mind Finally, because the loss of the individual human body would have a significant impact on the way in which an individual interacts with other human beings, various sets of ethical questions may be considered: – Since backups of a person would need to be created to protect against viral attack or sudden catastrophic failure of a main drive, how can an indi- vidual be sure that these are safe and secure? – Could the backups, themselves, be considered as persons brought into existence through a copying procedure of the original person? – Who has access to these backups then becomes a significant question as a breach of security would be cyberspace’s equivalent to a forced entry or personal trespass. The lack of privacy and of informed consent to the involuntary disclosure of information would also become a real problem. Hacking, in this scenario, would be a personal invasion on an altogether new level, perhaps putting it in the same category as other violent invasive crimes such as rape. – Questions can also be asked about what would happen if the backups and the files expressing a person were irreversibly lost. Would this then repre- sent a form of death of the individual? – Backing up could, in addition, enable a person to relive certain experi- ences. If one day did not turn out quite how he or she had planned, the individual could return to the beginning of the day and go through it again. However, this would require the person remembering that he or she had chosen to relive the day, otherwise he or she might become trapped in a never-ending loop. Moreover, if an individual was able to return to happier versions of his or her life, would it really matter? Would anyone actually know? And even if they did know, would they care? – Reliving in a computer may be meaningful only as long as the person does not interact with another uploaded being. Otherwise, this first person’s existence and electronic actions would become part of the timeline and experience of the second individual’s memory and cyber-experience. In other words, it would not be possible for the first person to delete his or her experience without requiring the second person to delete his or her own memories as well. This means that existing in a computer might enable a person to stop ageing, but this cannot assume that the clocks of cyberspace have stopped.341 – How would concepts such as compassion (‘suffering with’ in Latin) and empathy (‘feeling in’ in Greek), which make existences meaningful, be able to be expressed in digital persons, since these notions require a capacity to suffer? It is also possible to ask how such a capacity to suffer in computers could be developed. This is especially relevant for higher levels of suffering, such as that arising from existential fear, which may be necessary if life is 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.