Title: Substance and Relationality: Reassessing the Authenticity Objection to Intellectual Neuroenhancement
Authors: Nguyen Le Minh Chau, Nguyen Thi Thuy Ngan
Volume: 10
Issue: 9
Pages: 238-246
Publication Date: 2026/09/28
Abstract:
Objections to cognitive neuroenhancement frequently appeal to authenticity, yet they rarely specify the standard against which authenticity is to be measured. Drawing on Schmid's distinction between substance and relationality, this paper argues that authenticity is properly located in substance - the prereflective capacity for subjective evaluation , rather than in the socially observable self through which substance is expressed. Two accounts that would collapse this distinction are examined: Northoff and Smith's brain activity-based theory of selfhood, on which the ecological layer of the point of view partly constitutes the prereflective self, and Hume's bundle view, on which relationality constitutes the self entirely. Against both, the paper argues that the comparative regulation of concurrent mental states presupposes an evaluative standpoint that is not itself a member of the bundle, and that the incommunicability of subjective content limits what external encounters can constitute. Case evidence on trait self-knowledge preserved under episodic and anterograde memory impairment, together with findings on cross-role variation in trait expression, is used to distinguish change in relational expression from change in substance. On this basis, and treating intervention in idealized terms, the paper argues that the Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory locates individual differences in intelligence within relational information processing, so that the authenticity objection has not established that enhancement alters substance; and that because enhancement accelerates intellectual processes the individual already performs, prospective users can consent to it knowingly.