It seems directly out of a science fiction film.
Except that it is the most recent demonstration of Neurable of Elon Musk: showing brain data flows that could allow humans to communicate “thousands, perhaps millions of times faster” and even return the movement to the paralyzed and the view to the blind.
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Last year, Neuralink became the first company to implement a cerebral chip in a human patient. In July, the company advertisement That it already has seven patients in clinical trials, with ELA or paralyzing lesions of the column, equipped with the implantation of the size of a coin, which allows them to write, navigate and play chess on their devices only with thought; milestones that Musk considered elementary compared to the ambitious goals that he plans to achieve before the commercial launch of the technology planned for 2028.
The last “Neuralink update, summer of 2025” of Musk, and his vision of achieving “a fundamental change in what it means to be human”, poses complex anthropological questions that the Catholic Church must answer as technology advances.
Pope Leo XIV, following the work of his predecessors, has already begun to formulate an answer to the progress of artificial intelligence, stressing that any technological advance should be evaluated “in the light of the integral development of the human person and society.”
“Artificial intelligence, especially the generative, has opened new horizons at many different levels, including the improvement of research in the health field and scientific discoveries,” said the Pope in a message addressed to the participants of the conference on the held this summer in the Vatican.
However, he acknowledged that the AI ”also raises worrying questions about its possible repercussions on the opening of humanity to truth and beauty, in our particular ability to understand and elaborate reality.”
Neuralink demonstration
Neuralink, founded by Musk in 2016, develops and soul-in-laws brain-computer interfaces that allow controlling a device only with thought. Since then, the apparatus – considered useful for its medical application – has advanced rapidly, and the company glimpse a future in which thought -guided computing is integrated into everyday life.
In a one -hour video posted in July, Musk showed how the interface is helping patients in clinical trials through what he calls “conceptual telepathy.” He also addressed how the associated increase in brain processing rate could favor anyone.
“Your ability to communicate is very limited by the speed with which you can talk and type,” Musk said. “What we are talking about is to release that potential to allow you to communicate … thousands, perhaps millions of times faster than is possible now.”
During his latest update, Musk explained that increasing the “input/output bandwidth” of the human brain will allow “to match the will of artificial intelligence.”
He also raised rhetorical questions about the nature of consciousness and being, and proposed his answer: “Anyway, we are the brain. Basically … you can receive a heart transplant, a kidney transplant, but I do not know anyone who has received a brain transplant. So you are your brain.”
A Catholic response
Some Catholics specializing in ethics have questioned Musk’s vision in a new and superior way of being human, in particular because the human being confuses with the functioning of the brain and the body.
Steven Umbrello, director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in Willington, Connecticut (United States) and a research member at the University of Turin, said by email to the National Catholic Register – informative Socy of ACI Press – that “Musk repeats a family statement: ‘You are your brain.’
“It is true that brain function is integral to cognition, but does not exhaust what it means to be a person,” said Umbrello. “Consciousness, intentionality and moral responsibility point out a deeper ontological reality that cannot be reduced to neuronal activity.”
Umbrello contrasted Musk’s transhumanist vision with the Catholic vision From the person as a body and soul unit.
“Catholic philosophy has long distinguishes between the subjective interiority of the soul and the objective mechanisms of the body,” he explained. “The Neuralink project, however, tends to collapse both in one, which, not surprisingly, flattened the person by reducing it to data. The risk is to fall both in a philosophical error and in the erosion of moral categories such as responsibility, love and suffering.”
“Our Catholic anthropology insists that human identity is not derived from utility. It is rooted in our created being Imago dei”, In the image of God, he added.
Other Catholic experts coincide. In 2023, when the United States Food and Medicines Administration approved the clinical trials of the Neuralink device, the National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC), an organization based in Philadelphia that provides ethical guidance to US bishops and Catholic medical care providers, raised an alert voice.
Joseph Meaney, a senior member of the NCBC, wrote that, although “treating people with brain injuries or allowing the paralyz to walk are certainly good objectives”, the ultimate goal of Musk to connect the human mind with artificial intelligence to “create a ‘superhuman’ constitutes an attack on the sacred inviolability of the human person”.
“There is no anti -science agenda in the caution attitude of the Church,” Meaney said, “but prudential and ethical considerations that must be done for all possible uses of a certain technology.”
Secular ethical precaution
Arthur Caplan, One of the main secular bioethicists in the United States and United Nations Advisor and the World Health Organization shares that cautious position. Al Register said: “I am not a fan of Neuralink.”
“There are legitimate efforts to study brain modulation. These experiments are reviewed by pairs; they are approved independent instances and then published. That is the right way,” he said. “Neuralink is not reviewed by pairs”.
He also said that “Neuralink seems to be giving a gigantic step without relying on the real state of science: it is advanced too much, inserting huge things in the brain, when the rest of the scientific world introduces small key devices to stimulate just a few cells, not great portions of the brain.”
Caplan criticized what he called the rudimentary regulatory framework of Neuralink: “Since we are manipulating the brain, much more than that is needed,” he said.
He also expressed his concern that bioethics does not have the resources to face all the questions posed by new technologies.
“Things move so fast that science is far ahead of what ethics are considering. And the law? Well, it is even more backward,” he said.
A digital future
Musk’s plans of cyber enhancing the human person are not an isolated case. The near future contemplates multiple similar technologies.
According to A report From The Independent, OpenAi, creator of Chatgpt, plans to invest in an emerging brain implants called Merge Labs to compete with Neuralink, while Apple has patented some futures AirPods capable of scanning brain activity.
In 2023, researchers from the University of Texas They published results in which they developed an AI system capable of decoding brain activity in language consistent with a 72% precision.
That same year, goal achievement Develop a technology capable of deciphering brain waves and reconstructing an approximate visual representation of thoughts. And in 2024, the Californian Startup Remspace got Transfer ideas between two individuals in a long -distance sleep state.
As the scale of the data centers and the processing speeds increase, the combination of these technologies is expected to remodel society with a vertiginous speed.
The Church has warned of this danger and tries to guide that convergence so that technology remains at the service of the mystery that touches – the full human person – before private, corporate or governmental interests lead to society towards a much less human design, more similar to an episode of science fiction dystopia.
“The Church has the responsibility of hosting the scientific advances that support human dignity and healing,” said researcher Steven Umbrello. “But the technological narratives that obscure what it means to be human should also resist. Musk’s vision is radically modern, materialistic, progressive and instrumental. The Church, on the contrary, proposes a vision of the person who is sacramental, relational and communion oriented: an authentic and inverse trinitarian refutation.”
And how said Pope Leo XIV in his message to young pilgrims at a youth festival in Medjugorje: “No algorithm will ever replace a hug, a look, a encounter, or with God, or with our friends, or with our family.”
Translated and adapted by the ACI Press team. Originally published in the National Catholic Register.
Andrew Likoudis
Andrew Likoudis is a graduate of the University of Towson in Communication and Summer Piens 2025 for Ewtn News with the National Catholic Register.