So this is how we're going to go. So introductions,
talk briefly about brain machine interfaces and then the kind of scope of the talk is to see to what extent brain machine interfaces,
when we think of them, conform to kind of what may be called traditional theories of action within philosophy and whether they do or not,
maybe a good or a bad thing. So we'll talk about, of course, the theory of action, what's called a common causal deviance, not causal theory.
And then we have this disjunctive theory at the end of it.
So the kind of key questions that I'm interested in and I certainly think I've got close to answering them, is firstly, what is an action?
So again, I'm still broadly within the philosophical framework.
And then secondly,
the bit that really interests me is this question under what conditions does brain machine interface enable behaviour called qualifying as action?
So I'm kind of generated by thinking about brain machine interface, etc. for a lot of different types of interfaces,
a variety of different types of neurological device that can aid behaviour.
I mean the most typical one is cochlear implants, but perhaps the most extraordinary, remarkable stuff.
And if you're not familiar with Google brain machine interfaces and see the remarkable technology that we have now in Japan,
and one of the most extraordinary developments is how these devices can help for those who've suffered spinal cord injury,
particularly those who have become a quadriplegic. So the most vivid image for me when I think about this is Christopher Reeve.
Who as Superman had this image of being Superman, of being this extraordinary superhuman strength and ability.
And he's an extraordinary, tragic accident who was a quadriplegic.
And I remember seeing an interview, I think was that show in the States.
And he said confidently that he expected within his lifetime that he would be able to walk again, saying that wasn't the case.
But we have made extraordinary progress in this regard since spinal cord injury is a considerable number of people who've suffered,
who are rendered quadriplegic or have have a disease.
Most of the injuries, a lot of the injuries, 33%, motor vehicle accidents and other accidents like that.
And so what is a brain machine interface? So I'm particularly interested in what we call user interfaces.
So they work like this. So if you somebody like Chris Reeve, except in this case,
the injury that caused these kind of things just leaves the kind of cognitive functions intact.
I mean, what makes it perhaps so vividly disturbing?
So his thoughts, his movement intentions in that sense relate to famous roles in life celebration interfaces.
This conceptual is extraordinary.
Now, practical thing, if we could just connect these internal mental process, cognitive processes to a device, we could reach and have a clue.
So if BMI works its way, decodes new signals to extract voluntary movement commands that reflect intention.
So somebody with a brain machine interface, if they say she wants to move around,
she's able to do this because the device decodes certain movement parameters,
like the goal that she's reaching for the direction, the torque, the force.
So those elements we can decode.
So in March of last year, there was a story that was in The Guardian and then picked up elsewhere this remarkable by guy Bill Kercheval.
And that was just the headline from The Guardian. It says Paradise Man Moves On Using Power of 14 World First.
So what's unique in this is that this is crucial.
Robert was able to use. It wasn't a prosthetic limb.
This is anybody that with the brainwashing interface to what's called function that electronic stimulation was able to move his own body,
which had become paralysed after a bypass.
And the exploring part, the first part is that he was able to move his arm again, but was paralysed by technology.
And he was now able, as the Guardian says, to dream, concede himself something that he'd been unable to do ahead of time.
So, again, it's not from the stand brain machine facing this.
He said, no, no, the robotic arm. But if you're like me, that technology is quite extreme.
So as The Guardian said in the text of The Guardian.
So he was paralysed from below the neck of crushing his bike,
had electrical implants implanted in the motor cortex in the standard area of the brain for motor brainwashing interfaces.
Then he has sensors inserted in his forearm, which allows the muscles and hand to be stimulated in response to signals from his brain.
So after eight years, he can do these remarkable things.
So when you look at that, when we think about the kind of what the thought that he could be, somebody could say, well, yes, he's just like us.
He's just like us in the sense of if you have got to kind of with you, we are physical systems.
The brain connects to the body when I move my arm. It's really just the same feel kosher problem.
So it's a different type type of technology, but essentially the same type of thing.
So if you think about the concept of action,
you think about the concept of ancient in making these movements feel kosher farmers acting in the same way that I'm acting,
if I raise my arm, he's an agent.
He's somebody who's interacting with the world. So if you imagine that kind of invention, then imagine a completely different thing.
Let's say that you use cinema to turn off on the projector.
It would be interesting. But all I'm to say that the projector is part of me, even though I can control it.
We tend not to think that we will coach over the weekend.
Once we see him move, we can think of the the heaving body renovating that project to add something different to.
It's now integrated enough to think that he's performing actions with that.
So somebody could say, you know, there's really nothing.
This is just a technological question. So just like hunting my favourite ones, you know,
the Empire Strikes Back when they produced I want to get some you all from me and the economy just like this.
So you might you know, you could say, look, it's there's no philosophical problem here, but having a newborn is just like having an old body.
Well, Kosovars actions are examples of intentional action.
He wants to feed himself. He wants to move the cup to his mouth.
That is, lose the cup to his mouth. It's just the same as anybody in this room.
More clearly, it seems that he's always keep doing something.
And again, one might look at that. If you can get you put video on online, you can say, look, he's obviously doing something.
He's guiding and controlling his body in a way that reflects his intentions.
So to think about this in front of you, have we talked a couple weeks ago.
So here's an example of food in action, most exquisite footwear, and then contrast or compare that with this.
So this is a guy so he's wearing I'm sorry in pictures up pretty good an exoskeleton.
So this is before the last president of the World Cup,
an individual against spinal cord injury with the use of in cuffs is able to walk using this exoskeleton.
So again and again, the question is, should we think of this as an action?
On what grounds is it? Actually, you might even be interested to ask whether we think this is the body and why or why not.
So briefly to talk about brain machine interfaces.
So it's a very, very brief. So you maybe can be categorised in the following ways, said that, broadly speaking, are they feasible,
non-invasive, non-invasive, non-invasive devices, EEG devices that rest on top of the scope of the devices.
The cortical micro stimulation devices are inserted into the brain to take different types of signals that you can
detect on the far end of individual neurones or sound electrical electrical activity across a variety of neurones,
so that you get greater accuracy, greater. If you go further into the brain, then obviously you pay the price of the interface.
And then what I think is, I hope interesting to you as well as to make this distinction between direct and indirect devices.
So direct devices in a way, in principle,
if I feel kosher about the news of events that are detected or used on those that are intrinsically related to you, can you do something simple?
Speed The movement of my arm is enabled by my attention to move my SO wherever you want to cash that out.
So when you when I move my arm, if you are physically you're going to say that's caused by the neural status of wanting to move like.
And again, if you're physically sick, you want to say that broadly speaking,
to fudge on that actions, of course, are related to specific time to new event.
So this is what we mean by the intrinsic relationship. In contrast, there are movements that have no intrinsic relationship.
So for example, you could learn in principle, I think you could learn to stop the car by controlling your heart rate.
So then and all. And again, in principle, you could learn to walk by changing your heart rate.
If we had some device that connected regularly with heart rate, you could do that.
But there's no it's what we call we simply co-opting a neural event in that case.
So the information, again, as far as I know in broad terms, this is the information that brainwashing interfaces can generally detect.
Position. Direction of force and reach.
So when I move my arm, as I understand it, the brain machine interface can detect that information.
It can detect goals where I want to go in the sense of if the movement is over there, it can detect the movement.
It can detect what we call these movement parameters.
So if I have it, if I feel Koskoff is off for a drink of water.
It's in one sense not detecting the desire to say.
It's detecting the movements that are going to enable and BMI in standardly they involve include visual feedback.
So when we're training both humans and non-human primates, training for this historically involves facial feedback.
So training consists of two things the individual hyper imagines moving it.
So one way that we can train the system is when I imagine in my home the device records the neural activity for that imaginary movement,
because maybe they're surprised the imaginary movement due process is very similar to what actually occurs if you move your.
So there's that. And there's also in terms of yes.
Training and then then performing the movement itself. Certainly in trials, somebody like Bill Kosovar is moving his arm.
The system is recording the information and then film of trials and making detection in the second more accurate.
Finally, present brain machine interfaces tend of standardly aphorism of effort.
That is to say, we've made substantial progress in in enabling body movement, but we've made less progress in providing sensory feedback.
So in Kosovo's case, he can move on, but he's not receiving any tactile feedback.
So using these distinctions,
this distinction again between brain machine interfaces that I direct and brain machine interfaces that have indirect signals.
So the indirect ones, which we'll talk about.
So you can cause movement by the suppression of cortical regions, controlling cortical women's detection of amplitude differences.
So let's say that you want to spell out a word using a computer and you want to spell out the word can.
Well, given that you won't see, there will be a difference in the neural signal whether the cursor is on C, I suppose it's on another word.
So given that difference, we can make that difference and using it control.
And then a movement related calls for protection.
The phone call. So every time when you move or intend to move, there's a stigma with a course about standing.
We just before the intended movement which again can be used to control the device.
Okay. So what we have so far is maybe something about brain machine interfaces, something about spinal cord injury.
So what we're going to do now is this first kind of theory of causal theory of action,
which is a theory about kind of standard philosophical theory about what it means to act.
So they decide what is appropriate to the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raised my arm.
Geography and one.
What is the code in the literature? The standard view? The orthodoxy?
Perhaps. The causal theory of action. So we start with the notion of poverty.
That's our basic top level category.
And in poverty, movements are distinguished into two parts.
Two types. There are either actions on there happening.
It's said actions identified the following events, body movements and codes related to the person's beliefs indicated.
In contrast, may Hackney's body movements with a different aetiology.
So standardly. The Causal Theory of action. Joe wants another sip of coffee.
She reaches out a hand to pick up a cup. That's an action.
Because the bodily movement is caused by beliefs and desires of the class by intention.
It's simply a happening if it's not an autonomous action, if it's a reflex, or perhaps bizarrely, somebody moves around.
So according to the causal theory, a necessary sufficient condition of physical action.
Bodily movement is causal related to a person's beliefs and desires.
So he's put in the case and this is maybe rightly or wrongly what got me to think about this.
So the pieces from a greater and more correct chair,
which had a device implanted in his brain that allows a neuroscientist to detect whenever its heroes are called in action,
triggering intention to perform an overt action. Unknown to him, two things are true.
He's moved areas and efferent pathways to unresponsive response with two proximate intentions.
Second, the neuroscientist, upon detecting the present presence of the intention,
stimulates his move to areas in efferent pathways, thereby causing movement.
To this case isn't typical to what's called the problem, of course, will be.
And the problem is this the CTA says that actions of bodily movements caused by intentional.
In the case of according to least in part caused by his intention.
But there's something creepy about this. You might think there's nothing to it, and that's fine.
But you alternatively, you might think, wait a minute, he's not Ed Sheeran isn't really acting.
So you can dress yourself how you want. So maybe the body movement includes because I've been watching the crown includes flipping off the queen.
So somebody might say why he did, sharing that it sounded like it wasn't a terror attack.
So surely the presence of the nefarious nuclear scientist takes some of that responsibility away.
So if that's your intuition in that case, then we can finish the case to have this file.
So now, to be clear, Isabel has had a devout quality in her brain, detects whenever she's acquired an action triggering intention to form an event.
Action? Isabelle is aware, unlike the cue, but she's aware of both areas, always unresponsive to approximate intentions.
This device causes harm.
So at first glance, if you're interested in the first case, well, we don't have a bona fide course of action or maybe something slightly greasy.
We should have a slight, creaky reaction, and that means just an in-principle theoretical case.
There's nothing empirical about it, but it seems that something here is enough to make us think, Oh, maybe she's not in control.
But this is just very broad. He put one of the Americans.
So one way the causal theorists kind of respond to this in the literature is in the kind of standard responses.
So just to say she for the causal theories, she can handle what's called a sensitivity condition,
which is a kind of counterfactual condition such that if Isabel had had different intentions, what would have been different?
So causation in this sense is to a degree contingent upon how sensitive the device or the system understood broadly is to counterfactual conditions.
Secondly, what seems to be important in both cases is the presence of a causal intermediary.
Thirdly, what Christopher Peacock calls differentiate explanation fish and aquarium quotas from says
regularities in the world we certain properties function things the properties of our.
So if we have regular what we might call world based properties, that would lead us more to think that we have a case of bona fide causation.
And finally, for basic actually defined, it's something that you don't have to do something else to.
So using the remote to turn off the TV is not the basic action, because in order to do that, I have to do something else.
Moving or raising your arm is a basic action. You don't have to burn or do anything to do that.
So how would this apply to Internet devices?
Well, briefly, it seems that these. Questions or reasons you might have been worried about the unions would apply in the direct case.
So here's the way I suppose I understand this is to see if there's a spectrum.
Such that if you again see very bright devices of to things,
the less reliable or the more co-opt it will have an impact on reliability, sensitivity and differential exploration.
So if we're co-opting something that is only really has no relationship to the person's intentions or the behaviour,
that will suggest that it's likely to be perhaps not particularly reliable.
Again, a reliable system. You'd want it so that if I want to or not, she's going to get short like she.
But you know, if my movements are very, very negative and don't respond, then they're not particularly good enough.
Secondly, you want a system that's sensitive, defined here. If I had different desires, beliefs or intentions, the system would do very well.
Given the specificity of indirect advice to each base.
It may be less likely that that's going to occur.
So they again, this is not a knockdown argument by any means, but it seems that if you think what is an action,
one of the reasons, one of the ways you might think it's not an action of these these factors would come into play.
The greater the BMI plays a role or as a causal intermediary, the next, we're likely to think it's an action.
What is? Six to how much longer?
Well, typically people would go for 45 or 50 minutes.
So 15 to 20 minutes, we can see what they want.
So we direct devices. The message is they pass here because again, we what is causing the movement is the neural state that is known to correlate.
So it's not the case that the broad electrical signals are being used to control my arm,
but this direct EMI is detecting the neural processes that we know underlie all of them.
How do we know that? Well, because if every neuroscientist could help detect that.
So, again, on a physically naturalistic perspective, we have detected, we can say this is what occurs in the brain.
We need to be aware of something like that, but probably not.
So you might say, well, look, the problem of co-opting and reliability shouldn't be that because direct devices use the real signal recurrently.
So but one concern we might have here is that, again, as I mentioned before, what exactly is being detected?
So like me, you might think there's a difference between these two things.
So a system that when I want to move my arm detects the movement parameters and a system that when I want to move, my arm detects my attention to.
No. It seems one could plausibly say the causal theory of actions tended to want intentional content.
What they want to say is that Jones bodily movement was caused by her intention to.
Now. Again, if you're a physicist, presumably there is a neutral colour that the group of type identifies with psychological types.
So that's what we would be looking for, not colour.
That's the colour need to be movement parameters.
And so somebody might object, he said, which I think is a very good objection.
Wait a minute, Tom. How is this different to normal? Because when I move my arms, it's not as though the intentional content is used by the signals.
But it seems that there is still that intentional content that's playing some causal role.
So this is last part. So in the literature, a ballistic course is a cause that just brings an event about.
And so one might say, look, brain machine interfaces, direct,
indirect or both are really ballistic causes because what's doing the causal work is
not the current intentional psychological states have such a role in causal theory.
Okay. So just quickly. So let's not do that.
So let's move on to this. Is this the first a kind of causal theory of action?
So here's a second account, a non causal account.
So. Harry Frank has a lovely article on this, which I'm referring to here.
So the non causal account of causation is irrelevant.
It's a relief when you see what is an action. It's got nothing to do with what caused Buckingham.
And using Frankfurt. Frankfurt's kind of main claim is that, look, we're interested in what happened a moment ago.
We're not interested in the state of your brain before.
I mean, if you accept the causes and precede defects,
then a causal account is always an historical account which tells you what causes bodily movement, not body movement itself consistent.
So Frankfurt says, look, what matters is what's going on during the time the person is performing the action.
If I'm interested in the concept of action, I want to know what's going on.
When you read about what happened before, whether before is a nanosecond or 4 hours.
Rather, action seems to be a matter of guidance and control.
The difference between their happenings and actions are what the system is doing currently to guide and control.
But as Frank said, since the vote, lots of systems or some systems are guided in control, like, for example, the donation of the people.
But we don't think of that in action. So what differentiates the donation of the people from action robustly for
Frankfurt is the degree to which the agent identifies with the causal mechanism.
As he puts it succinctly, our sense of our own agency when we act is nothing more than the way it feels to us,
whom we are somehow in touch with the operation of the mechanisms of the kind of which our movements are guided in that course guaranteed.
So what does it mean to be aware of your actions?
It's just that you have this sense of guidance and control.
So obviously it's a great place to go.
How would this apply to brain machine interfaces?
So in case they don't cause an account. So she'll get a lot of people who have used.
Control of the mind. I think she had a chapter to he talks about the missing body schema.
So the body schema is this generally nearly always unconscious representation.
We have all the kind of spatial orientation of our bodies.
So it's kind of hard to distinguish between between a body image, which tends to be a conscious thing and how you see yourself and the body schema,
which is so like a sensory appropriate setting, which is this whole conscious sense of your body space.
And this seems to be the integral part of action.
In order to move my arm, I must have some sense, some physical spatial orientation,
if not my food overall, couldn't couldn't move my arm because I need some spatial reference to do so.
And the governor talks about this famous case in Waterloo.
I got you. And I don't want you to suffer this acute sense of neuropathy since you lost all sense of sensation from the neck down.
So you can feel any. If you touch me.
The only way you know you touch me. I see you do that.
So. So A.W. loses his book. Remarkably enough, he learned to control his body movements through conscious control.
So if you mentioned that, what's that like? Imagine you're walking and you have to concentrate on positioning your body and moving your legs.
But he was adept at this. So I think he's still alive, has a regular job in life.
His name is normal to the ones that you or I do.
But he lacks that proprioception. So again, in this case.
You know, one might say, well, I think W has these.
These differences, this radical lack of body awareness, this lack of so lack of sensation.
But he's managed to accommodate this by learning.
The movements have become reliable. The alienates in the sense of his connection with his body.
But you could say, well, look. But although he lacks the body schema, he meets Frankfurt's notion because he's in touch with body.
You mean it's not what you or I?
He's not in touch with his body in the same way that I am.
I know the positions of my arms. But what could be generous do not simply rule out the principle that he fails to meet Frankfurt's conditions.
But this is very, very different in the case of the BMI case.
So in this type of case, you get proprioceptive information.
So there's very, very interesting literature about individuals with neuro prosthetic limbs, perhaps not as severe as those who were coachable,
but they're still receiving proprioceptive information, information about where the body is, but not conscious awareness of what they produce.
There's also evidence of neural fast. Typically, the brain learns to rewire itself to accommodate a new prosthetic.
And you have official feedback. But here, the level of control is so much worse than in the RW case.
So if your intuition tonight. Yes, look, we have got action because we've got conscious control movement to a sophisticated degree.
We lack that in this case. Okay.
So where are we so far? And just thinking about action, the causal theory seems to have this problem of causal deviance, which perhaps sweet stuff,
brain machine interfaces in subjection and non causal theory that emphasises a current movement.
And this notion, Frankfurt's notion of being in touch again would seem perhaps too extreme.
So the last part is just from. He briefly suggested another option.
So the disjunctive theory of action goes back to the beginning.
Beginning is the way that we cast action.
Between. Sorry, the way we pass body immigrants.
The connections and. So the disjunctive is on her account.
You start with the concept of action. And actions are sanctioned by the movements.
So can think about this and I if this is helpful if we think about the notion of gender.
And you could say certainly could pass the world this way.
And you could say that in order to understand or explain the difference between men and women, we have to appeal to the concept of gender.
And you might say he's happy, too.
I mean, what is this gender that's not male or female and not in a social political sense, but it's a conceptual thing.
Surely. To understand the notion of gender is to understand the difference between male and female.
We don't make any explanatory move by looking at this broader notion.
So on this notion.
Actions in Manhattan. These are essentially different things.
They're not subclasses of a normal primary concept called On the Move.
So as it says here, actions are bodily movements, minus intentions.
So if you were old enough to frame it this way, the notion of bodily movement is the exquisite notion where you abstracted something essential from.
And this disjunctive view is that it's this notion that standardly when we're interested in action.
I'm going to get. Perhaps anecdotal that we rarely in our lives want to know whether somebody is actually or it was a reasonable.
In the sense that we need to actively identify actions.
We don't intuitively identify multi body movements and then say, gosh, it wasn't an action or anything.
No, we intuitively see actions.
The world is framed for certain human action made more broadly.
It's framed in terms of action. So the question is not what is an action?
Oh, we know it was an action. We were interested in why somebody did that.
So the initial reaction, if you're like me, when you see pictures of in Kosovo,
when you look all them, you see vehicles of individuals using green machine interfaces.
Neuroprosthetics. Intuitively, we don't we don't doubt that the individual in this case believes doing something.
Again. It would be odd if you thought what you're doing.
Is that a reflex that we know intuitively recognised that fact and we do so because of context,
how we frame certain movements within this kind of broader environment.
But secondly, because of the complexity. And these are the factors that identify something as a match in the game.
We can say, why is it that it's clear to us that. Exactly.
And Keller has this phrase reinventing movement.
So if you think of the cases they talked about, so Callahan talks about in walks and in a way, Waterman has reinvented movement.
He's moving in a radically different way through conscious control.
So if you think that movement relies upon so much a sensation, then this is a radical departure.
Secondly, Bill Kosovars, you might say he's acting, he's controlling bodily movement, although that's one of the quotes.
He's got no idea how it happens.
He may have others in the room of reason he may feel alienated from this book movement is because he doesn't know what's going on.
But in a way, you might say he doesn't have to. That pragmatically he can do these things.
So we get into this disjunctive theory of thinking that actions the same person.
This essential intentional element exists the notion of agency that may be different from the ones that we had before,
where it's not necessary that somebody who is acting should feel commensurate or aware of the human body in the way that we did to make,
you know, maybe the next generation of brain machine interfaces don't feel anything like human body movements,
but maybe they don't have to in order for action to occur.
So in terms of adaptation, one of the kind of things talk about in terms of brain machine interfaces is in one sense,
why should we attempt to replicate what we have right now?
I mean, somebody could say, look, if we could just design a system that works like the human body that we create,
or maybe we can design a system where phenomenological needs could be different,
where somebody can manipulate his body that feels perhaps even radically different from the way that you or I do.
It has a very, very different causal history or commensal of feeding, but maybe that's just lot technology.
And then lastly, this notion of promiscuous embodiment me has come about.
So again, to think that in order to think about human action or physical action, intention or physical action.
This may be something that can be done in a variety of different ways.
So a standard view, he said. Action involves body language, but in order to make progress,
we don't want to define action in terms of whether we're moving the body because what defining what counts as a body often intermixed,
is with what counts as an action. So they mean we can imagine cases where it's an open question whether what you are moving is your physical body.
So if you think about it, very novel technologies or or coupled systems or kind of cyborgs,
we might not be able to answer the question whether this is part of the body or part of the world,
but it doesn't follow that that won't put all that prevents us from noticing the question whether that person is right.
Thank you very much.