By Wrye Sententia

When I consider our species’ agile curiosity and its increasing ability to directly tinker with thinking, a cascade of philosophical, scientific, and societal subtleties leave me swimming in the ever-broader stream of potential benefits and harms.

Thomas Jefferson said, “No people can be both ignorant and free.”  Education can compensate for a lack of knowledge.  But freedom of thought today involves a lot more than access to books and reliable information.  Recent experiments show the promise of developing neurotechnologies to stimulate creative thought, or maybe even to help grow neurons.

In the process of finding out more about how the brain functions, or how specifically our own brains cope with lived complexity, the question of what we will do individually, and collectively with our growing understanding requires serious focus.

No other human organ is as complex, or as fraught with conceptual difficulties as the brain.  It is hard to imagine that we will ever agree on how neurotechnologies should be adopted or regulated in terms of religious, epistemological, or scientific absolutes.  The polarized squabbles pitting conservative creationists against radical transhumanists are just one indicator. 

At the very least, we must begin to establish how a democratic society can approach these advances based on common guiding principles enshrined in the Constitution.