The Fight to Control Your Mind
Richard Glen Boire
Should the government have the right to alter the biochemistry of your brain? Richard Glen Boire, codirector and legal counsel of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, says no, and he's making his case before the Supreme Court. In Sell v. US, the government argues that it can drug Charles Sell, a dentist from Missouri, in order to make him competent to stand trial. Boire, whose amicus brief argues that Sell has a right to integrity of mind, explains why cognitive liberty goes way beyond this one case.
WIRED: What is cognitive liberty?
BOIRE: It's the right to determine your own thinking processes, which also means resisting attempts by others, including the government, to manipulate the electrochemical state of your brain. In Sell's case, the government wants to alter his thinking by forcibly drugging him. It's a scary notion with deep implications for the modern status of freedom of thought.
The Constitution already protects freedom of thought.
That's true. What we're arguing is that the legal interpretation of the Constitution needs expanding to account for recent scientific advances in manipulating the brain.
So you think the law isn't keeping up with technology?
To adapt Marshall McLuhan's phrase, the law drives forward by looking in the rearview mirror. The law needs to be harmonized with what's going on in society today so we're not just giving lip service to freedom of thought while the thing that makes it meaningful, the autonomy of a person's brain, is being eroded.
How is it being eroded?
The law needs to account for the plethora of new drugs and technologies making it possible to augment, modulate, and surveil thinking. The question increasingly is: Who has the power to do this, the individual or the government? We contend that the power should rest with the individual.
Charles Sell is a pretty unsavory character, particularly in his views about race. So why should we care what the Supreme Court says about his cognitive liberty?
Protecting speech for everybody means protecting it for unsavory people. The same is true of cognitive liberty. The point is to avoid giving government the power to commit cognitive censorship, whether it's targeting people we agree with or people we don't. That's inherent in all true freedoms.
- Michael Erard
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