The Ethics Behind Neuroethics, Neurobioethics, Sensory Enhancement, and Surrogate Realities: Worthy v Lost II

Surrogate Realities

A surrogate reality is the one containing one or more layers produced by a technological device. The surrogate realities can produce a lasting effect, which is unsurprising when considering leading theories of brain dynamics in the 2010s describe the mind as a sort of phenomenologically transparent VR device (Madary & Metzinger, 2016).

Surrogate realities are important because they offer new ways of experiencing and interacting with the world, but they are also risky because they can be used to manipulate and control individuals. This is particularly important for Bioethics of Displacement as love of belonging, as surrogate realities can be used to artificially create a sense of belonging or to disrupt existing communities. It is therefore important to consider the ethical implications of using surrogate realities and to ensure that their use is guided by Bodi’s principles: Vulnerable First, Big Picture Thinking, Proactivity and Scepticism.

Even if the psychology behind VR is almost universal, the way how a person gets absorbed in daydreaming or detached from reality makes the VR experience radically different (Baños et al., 1999). From the beginning there were those who considered many of the augmented reality devices, mainly the head-worn ones, as “electronic LSD” (Zachary, 1990) that got us higher through the willing suspension of disbelief (Slattery, 2008). Therefore, the market-driven one size fits all approach is flawed, another moral botch in a hype-ridden sector (McCrea, 2014). Despite that it’s well-known, many helmet wearing VR users are immersed in violent video-games while the affectivity is ready to join the VR somatic panoply (Kozel et al., 2018). So much so, that the gaming industry and market cravings for realism have raised ethical concerns about its abundant use of motion capture actors with no ethical code about what can’t be asked of them to do in such an environment (Kade, 2016). To cap it all, the brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have started to replace joysticks and pads and remain at doors of the non-clinical emulation of brain functions (Fafrowicz et al., 2012, p. 336).

The virtualization of social spaces turns the intersubjective differences into a measure of distance between people ready to usurp the old miles and kilometres’ throne (Sandu, 2019). Furthermore, classical intersubjectivity (and a good chunk of cultural anthropology!) falls in the History’s plot twist of the mutual understanding of natural and artificial intelligence. In turn, the self becomes a parameter in the complexity of pancommunication which gives the smart-city more weight in our incoming human corporeality (Arshinov et al., 2018). In addition to this, there is the gamified citizen science. It can lead to more critical crowd-sourced initiatives (e.g. against unhealthy food) but the common people lack of intimacy with sciences also can allow blatant Orwellian uses (Malina, 2009; Spitz et al., 2017).

If surrogate realities became a new channel for bioethics communication, it would be good news (Rieder et al., 2022). In this line, the submission of cyberspace to the common good has been relentlessly held by UNESCO (Fuentes-Camacho, 2018). However, this new digitalization epoch won’t unfold for good if many deep changes are not made before. The decolonial computing unveils the present day colonial structures in the interstices of postcoloniality, nesting in geopolitics and biopolitics (Ali, 2014). For example, the way the algorithms favour some nonverbal behaviours over others when two persons interact in a collaborative virtual environment can hide a classicist / racist bias (Bailenson et al., 2004). Civil society must not fall behind the public and private stakeholders from global polity when it comes to the present and future digitalization and virtualization of our daily lives.