Thanks, Tom, and thank you, everyone in particular.
Thanks, everyone for having me here, I'm having a great time in Oxford, so what I'm going to present here is a draft paper.
So it's very much a work in progress on the topic of mental privacy and the ethics of mind reading
.....
So it's really a work in progress, so feel free to provide any charitable or uncharitable feedback that's very much welcome.
So
I'll start with two quotes.
The first one is by Paracelsus, renaissance physician and natural philosopher, who wrote Thoughts are free and subject to no rule. On them
Rest the freedom of men. And the second quote is from centuries later.
Historian John Bagnall Bury the author of The Monumental History of Freedom of Thought,
started this book by saying that it is a common saying that it is free and men can never be hindered from thinking whatever it chooses,
so long as it conceals what it thinks. And this to two quotes, I think kind of provide the framework for the position that I'm going to give,
because in this paper, I have two main objectives. One is to scrutinise the technological and conceptual premises of mind reading,
and the normative part is trying to make an argument that privacy of mental information should be considered a fundamental right.
So when it comes to mind reading
many bioethicists and neuro ethicists perceive this as the kind of outdated
debate which was very popular in the 1990s and at the beginning of this century,
following recent developments in a functional magnetic resonance imaging technology.
This is what we could refer to today as the classic mind reading debate.
So for those who don't know
It's a technique to measure brain activity indirectly, namely by detecting changes associated with blood flow.
So when a certain brain region is in use.
So there is an increased neuronal activation, then blood flow to that region also increases.
So by detecting this increase or decrease in blood flow, we can also make indirect inferences about neuronal activation that particular area.
And a lot of neuroscientists a few decades ago were very excited about the
possibility of using functional magnetic resonance imaging to ensure mental states.
This is a quote by John Dylan Haynes a famous cognitive neuroscientist,
who wrote in the mind reading entry of the Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics that by combining fMRI with pattern recognition, we can.
It is possible to reach out very detailed contents of a person's thoughts,
including detailed visual process ideas, memories and even intentions and emotions.
And it is possible to read both implicit and even unconscious mental states, such as unconscious persons and decisions.
So this kind of very enthusiastic claims became controversial a few years ago for a variety of reasons.
One reason was that after I started is had a hard time being replicated replicated.
So a lot of amateur analysis in the subsequent decade showed that mania for large studies failed to record data analysis
published in their publications and making an exact replication of those studies nearly impossible and following this.
A lot of people started talking about the replication crisis in fMRI based neuroscience.
And then there was also a conceptual problem with such enthusiastic claims by Haynes and colleagues.
This is well put by Martha Farah who argued that due to interpersonal variability fMRI
I can demonstrate correlations between brain activity and behaviour on a group level.
But its ability to identify a single mental state in one person may never be totally tolerable level of accuracy.
So she is sort of lifecycles of scientific claims such as the Gartner's hype cycle.
We could probably argue that the end of the last century,
the beginning of this early century was a sort of peak of inflated expectations regarding mind reading.
Then we went through what we can be. We can call the disillusionment phase.
But I would argue that now we are moving up again towards what we can call a plateau of productivity neuroscience.
And in a second, I will explain why,
Problematic conceptual premises of the classic definitions of mind reading, I think a very valuable account is provided by the internet,
and so kids born in the early 1990s works on mental representations as they distinguish
what they call representing from representatives of mental representations.
Also hold the distinction between the vehicle of the mental state and the content of the mental state, and Denver and Ginsberg argued.
And I think this is still valid today, as summarised thought,
is that what we can't grasp from fMRI signals or other indirect or direct recordings is the
vehicle of the mental state and not the contents of the mental states to use an analogy.
We can reveal something like a traffic road sign, but not the actual process of crossing the road on the zero.
So what has changed since then,
why the debate about my inbreeding that happened to be obsolete a few years ago is interesting again today for neuroscience,
for computer science and for others. I would argue there are two main socio technical trends that are interesting here.
The first one, we can call it a decoding and the other one, we could call it big data,
as applied to mental states or big mind data in absence of a better word.
So why is I changing the science of inferring mental states from brain activity?
Mainly because the AI models, especially an analysis artificial neural networks,
are providing the algorithmic tools to enable a new type of inference.
So logical inference in neuroscience in imaging studies was what has been called the forward inference.
So you manipulate the specific psychological function in order to identify, identify localised effects of that manipulation on brain activity.
So let's say you manipulate attention and then you identified the localised effects that manipulating
that tension has on brain activity in which brain regions are involved with AI based models.
What we can do is also what has been called by people like Russ Poldrack and others regarding inference.
So you sort of reverse engineer the process so you can reason backwards from patterns of data such as neural activity.
But as we will see, it's not necessarily brain dead, it's not necessarily neuronal activation to infer the engagement of specific mental processes.
And this is a new thing, and it's quite exciting. What new approaches to competition neuroscience can do?
I think this is one of the most interesting cases the work of Jack Gallant and his lab at the University of California, Berkeley.
I think they are probably the research group that worldwide is coming closer to ensuring not only the vehicle of mental states,
but also the content to understand its terminology. These are two studies that they published three years away from each other,
the first ones about reconstructing the visual content of mental states from brain activity.
So basically, they presented participants with visual stimuli, and this piece was a clip of a short movie.
And then they train an artificial neural network to reconstruct the visual content of these mental states from using only brain activity.
And as you can see, the level of detail is not grandiose, so you cannot determine, for example, the identity of the person involved.
So you cannot use it for evidential testimony in court,
but it's really quite advanced and sufficiently sophisticated to determine whether
you are having a mental state related to a person as opposed to an unknown person,
as opposed to an object and even as opposed to a non-human animal.
So I think this is really quite exciting.
In this other study, what they were able to do was to infer the content of the semantic content of mental states.
Some of the first study was about visual content. The other one is about semantic content.
So they train using the same methodological approach that you train an artificial
neural network to decode the semantic content of mental states for productivity.
So this map identifies with which content for could be inferred from brain activity.
The concepts implied are those that have a higher statistical accuracy.
So those that are more reliably the ones in in blue or purple are the ones that could be inferred with less statistical accuracy.
And if you go close, you could see that all large taxonomic concepts.
So, for example, being a German or even being a mammal could be inferred quite reliably by the artificial neural.
The second socio technical trend, which I think is revamping interest on my reading, is what we can call a big mandate.
As I said, if you have ideas about a better concept, this is very welcome.
So that approaches that basically involve data related to mental states,
so we can call this a large scale, the availability of neural and neural data resources,
which is enabling processing activities that are aimed at inserting mentioned information by reversing friends.
Why am I saying neuro and non-euro?
Because this process of rigorous inference can allow us to reconstruct mental states not necessarily only from brain activity,
but also from data such as voice recordings, text and so on, are several trends in this field.
One is consumer neuro technology,
which is basically new technology used outside of the clinical setting or outside of the biomedical research setting.
As a personal technology, more and more people worldwide are using devices such as wearable neuro headsets like this chew that you see here.
They're usually based on electroencephalography, so they collect electrical activity from the brain in a non-invasive manner,
and this can be used for a variety of purposes, such as cognitive training, neurofeedback and so on.
Other technologies such as digital phenotyping can use a similar approach,
but instead of collecting direct brain activity directly, they mine proxy information.
So, for example, approaches, which has affective computing.
Also for the motion, I can use face recognition technology to create statistical correlations
between certain face expressions and certain mental states with an increasing,
increasing degree of accuracy and social media platforms, as you all know, are attempting to do the same.
So there are studies that, for example, use Instagram pictures as a predictive biomarkers of mood disorders such as depression.
And the Cambridge Analytica scandal from 2018 was a very famous example of abusive data processing
actors using social media data to ensure mental states for purposes such as psychographic profiling,
so clustering people according to their psychological traits.
So based on these trends, we'd probably argue that mind reading in the public mind,
reading is more complex than we originally thought, and we can distinguish probably two different problems of mind reading,
which using borrowing the terminology from Noam Chomsky stewardship of language,
we would probably call my reading in the narrow sense, and I'm reading in the broad sense.
So when reading a narrow sense,
there's the possibility that at some point we will be able to decode the content of mental states from print reporting.
So this is possible from my reading. And as we said, with studies like the ones and I mentioned before, we are slowly embarking on this project,
but we are quite far from having a like a rich and complete understanding of the content of mental states.
But what we are already experiencing today and what is already relevant from an ethical perspective,
is the possibility of revealing privacy sensitive statistical correlations between certain obligations.
European Union Road data. I think we will need access to personal.
What's going to happen up there?
Let's see. The laptop would survive and answer the mental states so.
And the second problem is already very relevant today. So this two problems can also be worded by distinguishing truth.
Typekit practises are now shifting from from that perspective to the normative domain.
We can distinguish two problems of privacy the first one, we could label it as neutral privacy and the second one mental privacy.
So what what? What's the difference? Let's try to frame this broadly.
So privacy, as you all know, what is conceptualising in many ways about the most common and influential approach to
conceptualising privacy is the one provided by Warren and Brandeis at the beginning of the year,
at the end of the 19th century, who interpreted as a right to be alone.
And a lot of research in legal philosophy as tried to determine what the actual meaning of this act of being, let alone.
And one influential account is the one provided by both in the 1980s,
according to which privacy is the condition of being protected from unwanted access by others,
either physical access through personal information or attention.
So and when personal information is invoked, so disturbing in in definition, then we have a sub type of subset of the subset of privacy,
which is called information private, so that the privacy of private personal information would,
you know, privacy and mental privacy fit in this picture? There are two types of information privacy, but they are not at this.
Two subtypes have a significant area of overlap, but they are not separate entities.
So it is possible to have mental privacy within your privacy.
It is possible to have new privacy with government comprising both, and I would expand on this in your.
Privacy can be defined as the protection of brain data also called neuro data, whereas mental privacy concerns the protection of mental information.
Now distinguishing these two categories, I think, is very important because data and information are not the same thing,
even though they're these two terms are usually are often used interchangeably in ordinary language.
So brain data are the individual role measurements of human brain structure, activity or function that still need to be processed.
Whereas mental information is the process an organised set of data that collectively carry
a logical meaning so they have trust values and accurately reveal aspects of mental state,
such as thoughts, memories and emotions. As I said earlier, these two sets are not super premium, so that's why they're presented here in a diagram.
So not all your privacy challenges have to do with mental information,
and not all mental privacy challenges have to do with brain data, so it should give you an example.
There is plenty of potential studies about new imaging biomarkers of neurological neuropsychiatric conditions as
schizophrenia happens to be one of those conditions for which we have quite a large number of imaging biomarker.
But by decoding this biomarkers, we are not able to make any inference about the mental states of the people who have those biomarkers.
So we definitely have our health privacy problem because we are revealing sensitive information about the person's health status.
But you are not improving anything related to mental states and to the content of mental states.
On the other hand, it is possible to have mental privacy without your privacy being invoked.
This is the case, for example, of emotionally I would use our data sources such as natural language,
eye tracking or facial expressions to detect and analyse affective mental states or emotions.
So we can define your privacy as the right and ability to exercise control over their brain data.
And as such, this qualifies as a subset of medical privacy, which is the privacy of medical data.
No way did I have specific features that make them particularly interesting from a privacy perspective.
One is that they are predictive of present and future health studies and behaviour.
So if you have access to, for example, my neurological measurements that show a predisposition to develop early onset dementia.
This is an information that can be quite problematic for me if it falls in the wrong hands, such as my health insurance provider or my employer.
The high temperature resolution, meaning that certain techniques, such as elections,
can monitor brain activity, real time, which is not common to all physiological measurements,
and they are not read only for much brain data, always in a read and write format, so you can read brain information,
but also right into the brain using techniques such as neurostimulation and neuromodulation.
So potential risks for new privacy include the collection of redundant data during brain recordings,
which is particularly challenging when it occurs outside of the clinical setting,
such as neuro marketing studies, the repurposing and contextualisation of brain data collection of brain data on the weak and central genes.
This is a very big problem with consuming newer technology applications, which are used typically without medical supervision and only consent.
Regime is basically accepting the device terms of use just like any other software or hardware for a use,
and then also the problem of malicious hacking of neurotechnology.
So when someone's x a device to extract information or to sabotage the function of the device.
This will also fall under this category.
Regulating your privacy is quite a topical area now for new ethics and new law because of the and features of data that I've mentioned earlier.
There are several approaches, so a lot of people are arguing that we should regulate brain data in order to enhance our bar of your privacy.
One approach that I found interesting and I support to a large extent as being provided by
IS the brand new ad blitz who argued that we should treat all brain data as health data.
So basically expanding the category of brain data and even when brain data are collected outside of the clinical setting,
such as with direct to consumer applications, they should.
Still, the data collected in this way should still be considered health data and other approach,
which is actually not necessarily in opposition to this.
Actually, there are two things can be harmonised is treating branded as a special category of health data.
So all the way to our health data, but with enough data, you can have multiple categories.
As some of you probably already know,
genetic data are considered special category of health data under the General Data Protection Regulation of the EU.
And so brain data could become a similar special category of branding.
Then there are also more radical approaches.
So interestingly enough, the Chilean Senate has passed Neuroprotection Bill, which regulates brain data in the same way as human organs,
which is an interesting innovation because it's the first time that data are regulated like tissue.
So their approach is aimed at basically shutting down the implant market of consumer technology,
so you can only donate your brain data voluntarily or you cannot monetise.
That can only be an act of non monetizable donation.
The positive news here is that regulating neuroplasticity,
she can benefit a lot from technological solutions, so techniques to ensure data security and privacy,
such as encryption,
differential privacy and a secure multiparty computation and others are proving quite are proving to be quite successful in achieving this goal.
Now, let's look at Edmonton privacy, because here things get a little trickier.
So mental privacy can be defined as the right and ability of people to exercise control over their mental information.
And as such, it can be defined as a right to mental self determination.
And if we really look at the fundamental conceptual foundations of mission privacy,
we see that this cognitive dimensions of exercising control about information about ourselves was actually at the centre of the legal,
philosophical discourse we, before then, Europe acknowledges, became widely available.
This is a quote by Freed's anatomy of values.
And I think there is the argument that you make in this paper is that mental privacy is a fundamental prerequisite
of information privacy because only by exercising control over one's own information about their mental states,
it is possible in principle to exercise control over any other form of information.
The inherent features of governmental information are different than enduring features of data.
But what is, I think, very relevant from an ethical perspective is that mental information includes not only observable behaviour,
but also on an action and unspoken speech. The second feature is that mental information may elude conscious control.
So a lot of brain imaging techniques operate below the threshold of conscious awareness of the person.
So it's very hard for the data subjects to determine for himself or herself which information should be a secret or not.
And the same goes with the analogy base or other known neural approaches.
And then again, that this information is not read only for much, but it can also be modified.
Regulating mental privacy due to disappearing features is trickier, because it's very unlikely that data type based approaches can be effective.
So let's assume we regulate all brain data as health data.
There are still a plethora of other data sources that can be used to make inferences about mental states.
So this will not really solve the problem. So it seems that it is advisable to shift from data based approach to inference based
approach so that the normative criteria and here should not be the class of data that I use,
but the kind of inferences that are derived from a certain data.
So regardless of whether you are collecting voice recording or electroencephalogram data or facial images,
the important thing is the kind of inferences that your model throws.
So if your model is making predictive inferences, abutments state mental states,
it is at a higher risk of violating mental privacy and has to be regulated accordingly.
So the question should be not which data will be processed, but how.
Examples of mental privacy, relevant cases again involve in sharing emotions from face recognition, in varying moods,
from natural language processing and inserting cognitive function for neurofeedback or cognitive training apps.
So concluding,
why is mental privacy so based on the news and features and this normative prerequisites can or should be considered a fundamental right.
I want to really stayed here.
The previous quote by Burri, many of which highlights this intimate connexion between mental privacy and freedom of thought.
So people in this account can exercise their freedom of thought only to the extent that they can conceal their thoughts,
so only to the extent that they can exercise their mental privacy.
And another I think you quote here is by Michael Lynch, who wrote a very important words on privacy and the threat to the self.
And Lynch argued that the concept of privacy is intimately connected to what it is to be an anonymous person.
And I find it funny that you mentioned this never makes examples related to neuroscience or A.I. in this
book erodes that if I could telepathically read all your conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings,
then your existence as a distinct person would begin to shrink,
and our relationship would be so lopsided that there might cease to be, at least to me, anything subjective about you.
So trying to translate this into a set of normative requirements meant some
privacy could be construed as a poor fundamental right for five main reasons.
The first one is that it is a practise for which information privacy to work.
So only by exercising control over your mental states,
you can exercise control over the information that you externalise from your mental states onto the world.
It is considered a subjective experience. So mental information is the only piece of information that we process that is entirely subjective.
It is a precondition for the development and participation of person and personal autonomy as to the charges.
And it is a prerequisite for freedom of thought because of course,
unauthorised access to mental information increases the risk of covert a regional influence or manipulation.
So the higher the chances of violation of mental privacy, the higher the chances of violations of mental integrity.
And finally, as Reitman and other Abhijit mental privacy is necessary for the recognition of one's ownership of their physical and mental reality.
I want to conclude with an open question, because this is something I do not have a fixed opinion about.
I would be really curious to know about your thoughts on this.
So should mental privacy considered a relative or an absolute rights?
As you know, most rights are relative. They're not absolute. Very few rights are absolute, like the right not to be tortured.
They do not admit any exception. Pope is actually argued that mental privacy should be an absolute right.
So you argued that the skull should be designated as a domain of absolute privacy.
No, no one should be able to probe an individual's mind against their will, which is not permitted with the court order,
which not permitted for religious or national security purposes and no coercive use should be accepted.
An interesting alternative is provided by science fiction in 1990 episodes of Star Trek,
Captain Kirk is being informed that a dangerous fly as a fisherman who joined one of the groups that are
using the enterprise and desperately wants to identify the intruder and to know more about his plans.
And he appeals to one of the staff members who happen to have telepaths telepathic abilities.
And so Kirk wants to read the minds of all the visitors in order to understand which one is the dangerous type.
However, the captain is reminded by one of his assistants that, according to the law,
the right to mention privacy is an inalienable right of all information citizens and should not be abrogated.
But they also mention, of course, should not be abrogated without due process of law.
So it seems that in in court proceedings, exceptions to the absolute nature of mental privacy can be admitted.
And this is something I think that is very pertinent to our current scenario, especially new rollout.
So should, for example, mental privacy violations be admitted under risks for national security or for public health risk and so on.
And I think this is an open question to which I don't have an answer yet.
We can discuss the pros and cons of each approach, but I haven't balanced them yet.
So thank you very much.