This article takes a long time to get to the point; being a magazine article it fills us in with a lot of the background stories of the people involved. And the question isn't exactly "do brain implants change your identity?" but rather "how?" For example, they might change the way we think, but they might create change simply by curing an illness around which the subjects had built their existing identity. Still, the changes reported seem real, and given the way the implants and the brains learn from each other, the story of identity change is plausible. This does indeed raise a series of ethical questions (questions educators should also ask) about the nature of identity, continuity, and what makes life worth living. (Note: the New Yorker allows a few free reads and then throws up a paywall; I use Firefox with a uBlock Origin plugin which counters this).
Today: 2 Total: 97 [Direct link] [Share]
