When Minds Merge: Neural Telepathy, Neurorights, and the Limits of Voluntary Privacy Waiver

Abstract

The rapid advance of neurotechnology has produced a vibrant scholarly and legislative debate around neurorights — a proposed generation of human rights designed to protect mental privacy, cognitive liberty, mental integrity, and psychological continuity against the most threatening applications of neurotechnology. This article argues that the neurorights framework, while representing a genuine and important advance in the governance of neurotechnology, contains a structural blind spot: it was designed to protect individuals from non-consensual external interferences and is not well equipped to address scenarios in which individuals voluntarily choose to waive or dissolve their own mental privacy. To illuminate this limitation, the article focuses on a paradigm case made increasingly plausible by contemporary brain–computer interface (BCI) research: the scenario of a group of individuals who voluntarily interconnect their nervous systems into a form of technological "neural telepathy," sharing thoughts, emotions, and mental imagery continuously and without filter. We argue that such a scenario cannot be adequately governed by neurorights alone and demands a complementary framework of neuroduties — legally and morally binding obligations that flow from the embodied, relational nature of the human person and that constrain certain forms of radical voluntary self-transformation. We develop the philosophical foundations of this framework, engaging directly with liberal autonomy theory and with existing legal instruments, and identify three clusters of problems raised by consensual neural interconnection: (1) mental health and the preservation of the bounded self; (2) personal identity, individuation, and the attribution of moral and legal responsibility; and (3) the irreducible social and legal functions of privacy that transcend individual preference.