The US Food and Drug Administration cleared the company to conduct implant trials on humans last year, justifying its decision on the basis that the technology may help patients overcome paralysis and other neurological conditions. But more is at stake with respect to implantable brain-computer interfaces BCIs and the radical changes to our way of life their existence implies. The basic idea of BCIs is that of a direct communication pathway, first between a wired brain and an external device, such as a computer, and then between brains themselves, or brain-to-brain interfacing.
The development of communication from the spoken word, in which varying layers of mediation exist between interlocutors — writing, telegraph, phone, internet — would be circumvented. Even if we endorse the feasibility of shared experiences, a series of questions arise. But what if language in all its clumsiness and simplification generates the elusive wealth of our thoughts?
I only learn what I wanted to say by effectively saying it. We think in words: even when we see and experience events and processes, their perception is already structured through our symbolic network. What BCIs promise, however, is not only the abolition of language but also the abolition of human sexuality. What constitutes human sexuality is an unnecessary complication that prevents direct access to a goal: failure measured by the standards of simple instinctual mating is cultivated as the resource of new sexual pleasures.
Can we imagine something more stupid from the standpoint of successful reproduction , for example, than the tradition of courtly love in which the completion of sex is endlessly postponed? So how could courtly love become the model of high eroticism? And what about our perverted games, in which a particular object or gesture that should be constrained to a subordinated moment of erotic foreplay turns into the central feature, the focus of libidinal intensity, which eclipses the big procreative Act?
Is this dimension of erotic mediation not threatened by a direct brain-to-brain link? Is it not much more reasonable to surmise that, when I am plugged into BCI, I will not even be aware when my inner life is transparent to others? Does BCI not offer itself as the ideal medium of political control of the inner life of individuals?
