Fernando Vidal

“At the individual level, cerebral subject is not a label that can be permanently affixed to anyone but is rather a way of denoting notions and practices that may be operative in people’s lives some of the time. In practice, no one conception of the human is monolithic or hegemonic in a given culture, and persons are not one kind of subject alone. For example, the developmental biologist Scott F. Gilbert (1995) contrasted four biological views of the body/self—the neural, immunological, genetic, and phenotypic—and put them in correspondence with different models of the body politic and different views of science. He thus highlighted how political debates mirror disputes over which body, and consequently which self, are the true body and self. “Immune selfhood” has a very rich history of its own (Tauber 2012), but writing in the mid-1990s, Gilbert noted that the genetic self had been recently winning over the other selves. These may be theoretical constructs, but they have real consequences. Thus, as Gilbert points out, in controversies over abortion, the self may be defined genetically (by the fusion of nuclei at conception), neurally (by the onset of the electroencephalographic pattern or some other neurodevelopmental criterion), or immunologically (by the separation of mother and child at birth). In each case, when affected by concrete medical decisions, individuals accomplish the “self” whose definitional criteria were used to reach the decisions.”
― Fernando Vidal, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject

“If neuromaturation could provide biomedical indicators of personhood, then, as human persons distinct from merely living organisms, we would exist essentially from “brain life” to “brain death” (Jones 1989, 1998).”
― Fernando Vidal, Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject