Page - 188 - in Cyborg Mind - What Brain–Computer and Mind–Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics

188 • Cyborg Mind A woman is murdered in her home by a masked man wielding a hammer  – an act captured on videotape  – but first she’s able to deliver a blow to his head with the tool. After that counterattack, an accomplice of the man spurs his companion to kill the woman by yelling, ‘Let’s go!’ The police (correctly) sus- pect that the killer was the woman’s husband.407 Carrying out brain scans on the husband could then help determine several key facts: – Did the alleged killer suffer brain damage of the sort a hammer blow might cause? – What were his automatic and physiological responses to photographs of his wife  – disdain and loathing? Love and sadness? – Could the suspect recall the ‘Let’s go’ urging? Within the current framework of brain scan technology, it may be possible to accept that all of the scans undertaken on the husband should be permis- sible in court, which could then be regarded as more intrusive than a blood sample. To respond to such a scenario, Farahany proposes a new classifica- tion of information, which would capture the types of thought-data being discussed. Moving along a spectrum from the less to the more protected, her proposed categories are: – identifying information; – automatic information (produced by the brain or body without effort or conscious thought); – information that has been memorised; and – uttered information (including information uttered only in the mind).408 Recognising the limitations of these categories, Farahany acknowledges that the gap between how courts treat automatic information and people’s moral intuitions is problematic, but argues that the categories can be a tool to expose that gap. Her intention is to try to reconsider how to approach these questions, with the aim of establishing a framework that will give rise to a robust democratic debate about how various competing interests can be bal- anced. The intention is not to establish categorical results. Instead, Farahany indicates: ‘Truthfully, there are things that fall in between, and a better thing to do is to describe the levels of in-betweenness than to inappropriately and with great difficulty assign them to one category or another.’409 One example of such a difficulty is when a person gives appropriate con- sent for parts of his or her brain functions to be examined, without realising that it may be impossible to set limits on what is in fact being read. Thus, he 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.