PhD on Brain-computer interfaces & the disruption of the concept of personhood

As part of the inter-university research consortium, "Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies (ESDiT)" Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in collaboration with UMC Utrecht and

TU Delft are jointly seeking to hire a PhD student for a four-year project on 'Brain-computer interfaces & the disruption of the concept of personhood.'

Over recent years, rapid progress has been made in neurotechnology, including the ability to record and directly stimulate neural activity, with the potential to create increasingly effective brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Such emerging neuro-technologies encourage us to consider new ethical questions, and force us to question some of our ingrained ethical intuitions and concepts. Of particular interest is the question of  'what constitutes personhood'? In answering this question, Western philosophical approaches typically focus on notions such as autonomy, independence, unity, control and speech. These ontological framings of personhood quickly spill over into the ethical domain - shaping our views about concepts such as moral standing, responsibility, and what it means to have a life worth living.

Neurotechnologies, such as BCIs, encourage us to take up the question of personhood with a new sense of urgency, as intuitions about personhood are challenged by wholly novel case studies. BCIs use brain signals to control a computer, offering muscle-independent access to communication software. This has, for instance, allowed some advanced ALS patients with 'locked-in syndrome' to communicate even when speech or muscle-based control of speech-devices are no longer possible.

The case of BCIs used by locked-in patients appears to disrupt the central role that concepts such as independence, control, and ownership (of linguistic expressivity) play in defining and attributing personhood. Furthermore, because BCIs enable people who would otherwise be locked-in to give expression to their inner lives, BCI's have also provided surprising insights into the value these patients still place upon their life, where this is typically underestimated by caregivers and society.

In light of these thorny ontological and ethical issues, the aim of this project is to answer the following research question: how do BCIs disrupt assumptions about where and how we can
(or even should) demarcate something as ontologically and ethically significant as personhood? As a secondary objective, the project will contribute to new interdisciplinary approaches and methods at the intersection of STEM disciplines and ethics/philosophy. Moreover, insights gained from the project are likely to ethically inform the ongoing design of current and future BCI technologies. 

This PhD position represents a unique interdisciplinary collaboration between medical neuro-technologies (UMCU; prof.dr. Nick Ramsey; dr. Mariska van Steensel); ethics of technology
(TU Delft; dr. Janna van Grunsven) and psychology of human-technology interactions (TU/e; prof.dr. Wijnand IJsselsteijn). The PhD will be formally appointed within the Human-Technology Interaction group, which is part of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences at TU/e. The innovative potential of this research project is enormous, since the selected Ph.D. candidate would be embedded within Nick Ramsey's research group at UMC Utrecht, working directly with those responsible for developing a world-wide first, fully implanted BCI for home use.

This PhD position will be part of the Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies (ESDiT) programme, a ten-year international research programme of seven academic institutions in the Netherlands that has started in January 2020. This programme has a combined budget of
€27 million, and is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) in the Gravitation funding scheme for excellent research, and by matching funds from the participating institutions. The duration is from January 2020 to December 2029.  The programme has the aim of achieving breakthrough research in at the intersection of ethics, philosophy, technology/engineering and social sciences, and to position its consortium at the top of its field internationally. A key objective is to investigate how new technologies challenge moral values and ontological concepts (like 'nature', 'human being' and 'community'), and how these challenges necessitate a revision of these concepts.  The programme includes four research lines, 'Nature, Life and Human Intervention', 'The Future of a Free and Fair Society', 'The Human Condition' and 'Foundations & Synthesis'.  This PhD position will be situated within the Human Condition research line.

More information about the research lines and the consortium as a whole is available here: www.esdit.nl