Neural Voices of Patients with Severe Brain Injury?
Cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics : CQ : the international journal of healthcare ethics committees January 3, 2025 Matthew Owen, Darren Hight, Anthony G Hudetz
Some brain-injured patients who appear unresponsive can covertly answer simple questions through neuronal responses, raising the possibility of including them in low-stakes medical decisions to protect their autonomy. The warrant for crediting these neuronal responses is analyzed from neurology, bioethics, law, and philosophy of mind. Nonreductive physicalism's causal exclusion problem casts doubt on interpreting neural activity as indicating a conscious response, while a hylomorphism-inspired mind-body powers model supports such interpretation.