“‘Life as a whole’ […] cannot be reached as a sum total. It is never complete, nor is it even on the way to completion, since it advances to no end save its own continuation. As the generative potential of a world in becoming, life is always going on, a perpetual origination.”-Tim Ingold [50: 349].
Abstract
The so-called ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ cases have been provoked by people’s desires to make their own determinations about what personal information is accessible online to others (and when, and how) in a world of data permanence. Legally at stake is how personhood is defined and defended. Thus far, European law has primarily concerned itself with the delisting of ‘data subjects’ from search results and the deletion or anonymization of personal information from and by search engine operators. As a result, personhood has fallen into a kind of legislative void [43] I argue that this void is engendered by an old friction between the traditional Western secularist cognitive models that have formed the skeleton of Western law and the pulsing flesh of living human subject creation that pushes back against it. At the very least, the digital immortality of our images, voices, words and more, are bringing forth a variety of aspects of our ‘person.’ Meanwhile, religious worldviews have long understood and made use of phenomenological ideas of human becoming and transcendence that are far more congruous with how—even modern secular—people make meaning of their lives and self-creation, and how they think of posthumous existence. Moving through and with some of the most recent thinking in philosophy, anthropology, and cognitive science, I will develop the argument that human subjectivity is not only impossible to limit to the body, but that a radicalized ecological view is the only one that can ‘save’ us.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Infra this volume, Introduction.
Christopher Stone [81], originally published in 1972, was among the first important voices in a movement that has continually grown and evolved in the subsequent decades. See [11, 66] for overviews from a North American perspective. Beyond North America and particularly in South America there has been important support for more inclusive application of rights. To wit, in 2008 Ecuador became the first country to grant rights to nature. For an excellent recent overview of the state of environmental constitutionalism, see [5].
In this essay I use the term ‘avatar’ in a broad way with reference to the blurry lines between offline and online activities and forms of being. However, the term is often used to refer more specifically to characters created within online gaming environments. Such characters are increasingly attracting legal attention. For a legal analysis that uses a science fiction television series to illustrate the legal complexities of avatars and posthuman legal personhood see [51] [Kapica]. A perspective on avatars and the issues that arise with regard to copywright and property rights more generally is offered by [40] and the references therein.
One of the authors cited below quotes entrepreneur and tech leader Elon Musk who in 2017 stated in an interview that “AI is a fundamental existential risk to human civilization,” [63: 3].
Questions that have emerged include, ‘Can and should robots have rights’? [49]. For an expanded discussion on autonomous computer algorithms upon which legal personhood has been conferred and their potential to ‘greatly exacerbate the threat of artificial intelligence,’ see [63]. Schwitzgebel makes a case for a category called ‘debatable personhood’ stating, “An Artificially Intelligent system (an AI) has debatable personhood if it’s epistemically possible either that the AI is a person or that it falls far short of personhood. Debatable personhood is a likely outcome of AI development and might arise soon” [84].
This is a vast topic, and this essay will only be able to dip a toe in the waters of the debate, so to speak. Views on the metaphysical makeup of the human person include trichotomism (body-soul-spirit), dualism (body-soul or body-mind), physicalism (humans as purely physical) and idealist monism (humans as purely spiritualist beings). A broad survey which concludes by sustaining the “Constitution View” is offered by Baker [6]. Philosopher Alfred J. Freddoso similarly objects to the conceptual limitations of thinking in terms of Hobbesian physicalism (or materialism) on the one side and Cartesian dualism on the other [37]. For now, I will only say that none of these appear entirely satisfactory and that a more meaningful formulation lies in new terrain beyond even the horizon of embodiment theory, but more on this further on.
Vittorio Gallese has researched and written extensively on these advances for years. For a recent and accessible explanation of both mirror neurons and embodied simulation, see [39].
Para. 70 of the judgment.
The English language press mainly focused on the brothers’ 2010 lawsuit against the American online encyclopedia Wikipedia who agreed to remove the their names from the German-language portal, but not from the English language portal.
M.L. and W.W. v. Germany available at: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=002-12041
Outraged headlines include: “Two German Killers Demanding Anonymity Sue Wikipedia’s Parent,”.
“Convicted Murderer Sues Wikipedia, Demands Removal of His Name” and, “Wikipedia sued by German killers in privacy claim,” published in the New York Times, Wired, and The Guardian, respectively.
A somewhat paradoxical detail is that the anonymity the plaintiffs sought is fully supported in the Court documents themselves, since this is standard practice in legal documentation.
This phrase is used here https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/11/murderer-wikipedia-shhh in a brief (and somewhat superficial) comparison of some of these cases but see [20] for a historian's nuanced analysis that distinguishes between the right to be forgotten and the right to forget. For a contemporary legal reflection on the duty of memory, for example after acts of genocide or war, see [23].
Final judgment for Biancardi was handed down on February 25, 2022, and for Hurbain July 4, 2023.
See [31]
[43].
Judgement at Para. 30.
Ibid at Para. 31.
Compelling observations have been made on the confusion of legal responses from the perspective of time and digital presence. The argument is that while much attention has been paid to data permanence, it can also be observed that much information does not last forever. Therefore, the author argues, what is lacking is a taxonomy that addresses “the information life cycle in terms of phases in relation to information needs,” so as to "help assess the competing values at stake when one seeks to have old personal information ‘forgotten.’ ”Crafting good policy would require and interdisciplinary apprpoach that includes input from telecommunications, information theory, information science, behavioral and social sciences, and computer sciences. [2:370].
Philosopher Lucian Floridi has been addressing precisely this issue for some time. The collection entittled “Online Manifesto” that he edited includes several interesting contributions that share the premise that we are currently living a “new experience of a hyperconnected reality within which it is no longer sensible to ask whether one may be online or offline.” [35:14].
This statistic and those that follow are available at https://www.statista.com.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, full text available at: https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/.
Even if there is a steady stream of animal cognition research making the case that many higher order animals demonstrate ‘reason’ in their behavioral choices. For an entertaining glimpse of the high jinks of rascally orcas, which would appear to give strong evidence for both orca reasoning and culture, see [41].
The heart, two lungs, the liver, the pancreas, two kidneys and the intestines. In 2023, surgeons in New York performed the world’s first ever eye transplant. Six months after the surgery, the eye seems to be in good health, but eyesight has not been regained. Incidentally, the recipient of the graft survived a work-related high-voltage electrical accident that destroyed the left side of his face, his nose, his mouth, his left eye and half of his dominant left arm. In addition to the eye, multiple surgeries have restored his face and given him a prosthetic arm. The face and eye transplant came from a single donor (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aaron-james-narrowly-survived-electrical-accident-receives-worlds-first-eye-transplant/). The World Health Organization estimates that over 100,000 whole organ transplants are performed every year, while the US governments puts the number of tissue transplants in the US alone at more than a million. Biological interrelatedness is, to say the least, rampant. Global statistics are available at https://www.who.int/transplantation/gkt/statistics/en/, while American statistics can be found at: https://www.organdonor.gov/statistics-stories/statistics.html.
Kapica addresses legal personhood using the idea of the posthuman addressing precisely this issue of ‘assisted humans.’ Citing sociologist Nicolas Gane's observations about the inevitable mixing that renders ‘human’ and ‘technology’ inseparable, an interesting case is made regarding personhood: the “opening up of the human body to technological modification breaks down liberal humanism’s construction of human sovereignty and autonomy, and leads to revaluation of sentience and consciousness, to the ‘thinking machine’ or autonomic computer program. Such definitional expansion of intelligences and autonomy has implications for understanding and mediating legal personhood, especially since posthumanism’s transversalism and violation of the ‘purity of human nature’ challenges the humanist underpinnings of ‘personhood’ from which definitions of legal personhood originate.” {55:615–616]
Ibid.
As philosopher of consciousness David Dennett puts it, “…accepting dualism is giving up,” [24: 60]. Dennet is a dyed-in-the-wool materialist who has battled other philosophers for years with his provocative view that consciousness is not yet understandable in terms of the laws of physics, chemistry, biology and evolution, etc., but it will be. If consciousness is the magic of human beings, it is performed magic, with rules, sleights of hand, and illusions that we just haven’t fully figured out yet [25]. I am inclined to think, however, that somehow this position still relies on a conception that is not relational enough, that leans toward the static. As if the secret of functionality of consciousness were a mechanism or series of mechanisms, even, that replace the Cartesian ghost in the machine but can nevertheless be isolated as objects of study. ‘Constantly mutating and transformational interactions with and of environments’ would be closer to my understanding of consciousness.
An engaging compilation of contemporary philosophers’ theories of consciousness has recently been published by Bloomsbury [83].
Yet another debate with its own extensive bibliography is that of the categorical definition of the posthuman. At the least, two major categories emerge: cyborg and upload. The cyborg model imagines a future in which the posthuman is characterized by enhancements to current day versions of humanity which are, however, more advanced by means of technological additions and transformations. In some iterations, the cyborg is envisioned as providing the opportunity for an ontological kinship between the human and the nonhuman, as in Donna Haraway’s landmark essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” [47]. The upload model, instead, conceives of a disembodied, autonomous being, sometimes associated with the transhumanism movement, and sometimes connected instead to a “human-plus” model that bears more similarity to some cyborg conceptions. The field is highly interdisciplinary and quite muddy at the moment resulting in a view of the posthuman that is open-ended, with multiple and even mutually excluding definitions, as Christian theologist Thweatt-Bates rightly points out [84].
Though slightly outdated in its digital references, Meese, et al., offer a concise summary of posthumous personhood practices online and some of their philosophical and social implications, see [62].
Adam Ostrow, now Chief Digital Officer at media company Tegna made this prediction in the massively viewed TED Talk, “After your last update” available here: https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_ostrow_after_your_final_status_update/transcript?language=en.
A comprehensive list of posthumous online services is available here: https://www.thedigitalbeyond.com/online-services-list/.
One such service features a rather alarming tag line: “‘When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting’,” [62: 412]. Another site with a dark background and a skeleton just visible states, “We are gonna die. Deal with it. Sign up before it’s too late. Sh*t happens, be prepared if something goes wrong,” (https://postumo.info/).
See, https://life.storyfile.com/ and https://www.lifenaut.com/. The conviction that in the future some sort of extended life after biological death will be possible has long been explored in various kinds of fiction. In May, 2020, Netflix released a new science fiction television series called “Upload,” set in 2033 and featuring a marketplace of digital ‘heavens’ to which people can ‘upload’ their consciousness after bodily death. Life in these digital heavens is experienced by people who are now called avatars, and whose connection to the ‘real’ world is managed by companies staffed with customer service reps called ‘angels.’ The first season of the show is largely focused on a romance between an avatar and his ‘angel.’ The show efficiently captures several of the current fantasies regarding the future: eternal life, a consciousness that exists exclusively in our brains, and the idea that technology can easily replace all necessary bodily aspects, making physical connection between the dead and the living possible.
The original essay is available in translation here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-uncanny-valley. Basset offers a brief psychological review of the phenomenon [8]. In 2013, a popular English science fiction television series, Black Mirror, explored the post-mortem android concept in an episode entitled “Be Right Back.” A woman who loses her young husband in a car crash has an android made of him whose similarity is so convincing that it ends up horrifying her. She takes the android to a cliff and orders it to jump to its death. The android begs for its life. In the final scenes, we learn that the android has been spared. It is kept in a closet turned off, and brought out only on weekends, mainly for the young daughter to interact with it. The mother remains uneasy. The question raised is one that will surely be confronted sooner or later: can human facsimiles replace humans? If not, why not?
[26].
[26: 665].
Dewey expounds his theory in this vein in the concise but penetrating Freedom and Culture [27].
Dewey citing Maitland [26: 656]. A similar observation is made in the Italian legal experience by Falzea as paraphrased by De Luca, “It is clear then that subjectivity is not a natural quality, i.e. identified in rerum natura, but—like all legal values—is the result of a normative qualification: this explains how it could be a quality attributed not only to man.” Translation mine. Original text: “È chiaro fin d’ora che la soggettività non è una qualità naturale, individuata cioè in rerum natura, ma – come tutti I valori giuridici—è il risultato di una qualificazione normative: si spiega così se essa può essere una qualità che viene attribuita non soltanto all’uomo.” [21: 21] note 4. See also Falzea [34], well known for his work on the axiological significance of values within the Italian legal experience, and Barcellona, particularly his work on the autonomy of the legal subject [7].
Legal scholar Sheryl Hamilton begins her analysis on legal personhood with the American case of Terry Schiavo, a woman who suffered a cardiac arrest at the age of 26 resulting in loss of oxygen to the brain and pervasive brain damage. She was subsequently kept alive through life-support technology for 15 years, during which numerous legal battles were fought to determine her fate [46].
In the late 90 s, Jean-Dominique Bauby brought this condition to public attention when his autobiography became a best-seller and then a film. Editor-in-chief of a French fashion magazine, a brain stem stroke left him paralyzed with the exception of his left eye. Using an alphabet composed of blinking patterns, he dictated his book [9].
“Seeing, hearing […] or even thinking about yawning can trigger yawns in humans, and it is suggested that attempts to shield a yawn do not stop its contagion,” [60].
Italian philosopher Elémire Zolla insightfully proposed in 1992 that because virtual reality allows people to physically experience imaginary experiences, or worlds, it could contribute towards a broad understanding of the experience of religious faith [92].
[50: 344].
For a moving example of the creative poetry inherent in how children see the objects of the world and their definition-through-use, see [52].
Neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk did the foundational research upon which Mark Wolynn based his best-selling book, It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle [91]. Once again, we can find a strong a connection between the material and the immaterial. A 2014 study that tested the effects of fear in mice through the association of a particular smell with electric shocks found that the process produced changes in the brain structure and DNA of the affected mice which were passed on to their offspring, even though the offspring were not exposed to shock treatments. The researchers then showed that “the effects of traumatic experience can be reversed by retraining, specifically by positive conditioning in a safe environment. Mice exposed to a particular signal without any negative conditioning gradually became desensitised to the odour. They also lost the epigenetic modifications associated with this experience and the abovementioned physiological changes in the brain likewise disappeared.” This research in epigenetic inheritance could have important consequences for how we view evolution itself [82].
The argument that human immortality will be the next condition afforded by technology that can ‘upload’ human consciousness to a digital platform remains popular, as noted above. But see Di Paolo [29] again, for a rich and complex analysis of human becoming within an enactive phenomenology.
The president of the CGIL, the French data protection agency, argued that what is at stake with the right to oblivion is no less than bringing back “a natural funtion, forgetting, that renders life bearable.” Cited in [22:7]]. [61] offers a kind of ode to the importance of thinking carefully about forgetting as we we contruct our digital future.
Ricca has elaborated this theory extensively throughout his works, but for an application to legal personhood, see [74].
The world learned this lesson well in 2020 thanks to the global outbreak of Covid 19, which generated unprecedented levels of online replacement of previously in-person tasks transforming workplaces, education and more, with effects that long outlasted the pandemic.
Which has, nevertheless and in large numbers, not been carried out in a natural way from a traditional organically human point of view for at least the last 50 years, thanks to contraception, legalized abortion and assisted reproduction.
One classic such issue in the area of reproduction is male contraception. Male hormonal treatments were developed and tested 30 years ago and were found to have a 90–95% efficacy rate, however pharmaceutical companies have been unwilling to fund further research. For the moment, the category of responsibility for human reproduction seems to have been assigned to women alone. As one article posits, “Because the direct health benefits of pregnancy prevention for men are less tangible, male contraceptive development faces additional challenges because agents used for this purpose might be used by healthy individuals over many years. Therefore, acceptance of side effects, or even potential side effects, is very low” [69].
[89].
The pun here is intentional. The immaterial is important, but as I have tried to show, it also is inextricably interwoven with the material. In this sense it creates/is matter.
This is an adaptation of cognitive scientist Gallese’s statement, “To make sense of cognition we need to study the brain, the body, their relationship with the world and with the brain-body systems of others,” [39: 31].
Among the great chroniclers of comparative religion is Mircea Eliade. His massive histories of religious ideas provide broad and deep perspective, but for a slimmer volume perhaps more targeted to the concerns of this essay, see [32]. See Ries [75] for a compelling argument for homo religiosus, a conception of humankind in which a religiously oriented instinct predates the major religions. Otto is among the cornerstones of modern theology regarding the phenomenological character of transcendent experiences and understandings, in some ways anticipating from a religious perspective the explorations to follow in the development of embodied cognition theory. See [68]. Interestingly, there is a new thread of scholarship called ‘cyborg theology’ which addresses issues of the posthuman from a theological perspective. See supra, but also [90, 64, 79].
St. Augustine was of course among the original sources of interpretation of the Christian concept of Trinity, translated for the twenty-first century [4]. A comprehensive historical treatment of the concept of the Trinity is offered by Marmion D. and van Nieuwenhove, R. [59], while a Trinitarian theology perspective in dialogue with other religions, Reformed and Orthodox traditions as well as Asian, Latin American, feminist, Black, and Hispanic theologies is offered in Phan [70].
De Luca describes this inter-relationality between God and the individual in the Christian tradition succinctly: “Subjectivity is the image of God’s interiorization within man and, at the same time, of his transcendence.” Translation mine. Original: “La soggettività è l’immagine della interiorizzazione di Dio nell’uomo, e, al tempo stesso, della sua trascendenza” [21: 24]. The broad and accessible [42] argues that a dualistic view of the human person is inconsistent with both science and Scripture.
For a detailed analysis of medieval decretists’ development of ideas of ius naturale and the evolution of the conceptualization of human personhood and related rights, see [85].
As a follow up to his widely read, We Have Never Been Modern, the inimitable French philosopher-sociologist-anthropologist Bruno Latour proposed a bold comparison between religious icons and fetishes and “scientific objective facts.” In a relentless critique of critique, Latour suggests the need to mediate between subject and object (fabricated and real) across both religious and scientific fronts, yielding revelatory contradictions and productive comparisons [53].
[48: 671].
For a fascinating archeologically based study on the changing importance of Euro-American grave sites as a reflection of changing social attitudes towards the importance of social identity, see [65].
A concise yet wide-ranging essay collection on law and the body in the Italian experience can be found in [19].
[74: 35–40].
[72] as just the latest in years of research arguing this point.
In his popular treatise The Heresy of Self-Love, Paul Zweig provides a kind of anthropology of the concept of self, touching on the radical and threatening proposals of the Gnostics, then St. Augustine’s defense of the Christian idea of abdication of individual will, humbled before the authority of God’s representative on Earth, and then to St. Paul’s conception of man as a mirror for divine light. The book is, however, centered on the myth of Narcissus, and the human struggle over the ages with what he terms ‘subversive individualism’ [86].
Italian Civil Code 629, translation mine.
De Luca [21] is among the very few to propose a modern critical legal analysis of dispositions of the soul through a comparative study exploring the historical roots of personhood in both Canon Law and the Italian civil legal experience. Dillon [30] provides a robust historical legal perspective of the legal provisions in this regard in the United States, as does Guelfi [44] in Italy.
[48: 672].
[50: 77].
[80].
Important tasks assigned to AI can be found in the legal field as well. In 2018, a study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics claimed that an AI algorithm made better pre-trial bail decisions than human judges in New York City. Though the study caused something of a sensation—it was cited more than 900 times—it was later found that the algorithm had violated New York law by illegally detaining misdemeanor defendants without bail. An acute and compelling deconstruction of the study, which also warns of the danger in using ‘black box’ AI—machine-learning algorithms that make predictions whose explanations remain unknowable and untraceable—particularly in combination with absent field experts (no legal professionals were included in the design of the study), is offered by Meltzer [63].
References
Alter, Alexandra, and Harris, Elizabeth A. Franzen, Grisham and Other Prominent Authors Sue OpenAI. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/books/authors-openai-lawsuit-chatgpt-copyright.html. Accessed on 20 Sept 2023.
Ambrose, Meg Leta. 2013. It’s about time: Privacy, information life cycles and the right to be forgotten. Stanford Technology Law Review 16 (2): 369.
Ambrose, Meg Leta, and Ausloos, Jef. 2013. The right to be forgotten across the pond. Journal of Information Policy, 3 (2013), 1–23. Penn State University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/https://doi.org/10.5325/jinfopoli.3.2013.0001.
Augustine. 1991. The Trinity, Trans. Hill, Edmund. New York: New City Press.
Bagni, Silvia, and Domenico Amirante. 2022. Environmental constitutionalism in the anthropocene values, principles and actions. Abingdon, New York: Routledge.
Baker, Lynne Rudder. 2000. Persons and bodies: A constitution view. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Barcellona, Pietro. 1984. I soggetti e le norme. Milano: Giuffrè.
Basset, Debra J. 2018. Ctrl+Alt+Delete: The changing landscape of the uncanny valley and the fear of second loss. Current Psychology, Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-0006-5.
Bauby, Jean-Dominique. 2007. Le Scaphandre et le Papillon. Paris: Robert Laffont.
Biasotti, Maria Angela, and Sebastiano Faro. 2016. The Italian perspective of the right to oblivion. International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 30 (1–2): 5–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600869.2015.1125159.
Boyd, David R. 2017. The rights of nature. A legal revolution that could save the world. Toronto: ECW Press.
Brubaker, Jed R., Hayes, Gillian R., and Dourish, Paul. 2013. Beyond the grave: Facebook as a site for the expansion of death and mourning. The Information Society, 29: 152–163, Routledge.
Calhoun, Craig, Mark Jurgensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen. 2011. Rethinking secularism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cooper, John W. 2001. Biblical anthropology and the body-soul problem. In Soul, Body, and Survival: Essays on the Metaphysics of Human Persons, ed. Corcoran K.
Cooper, John W. 2009. The current body-soul debate: A case for dualistic holism. Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 13 (2): 32–50.
Cooper, John W. 2015. Scripture and philosophy on the unity of body and soul: An integrative method for theological anthropology. In Theology and anthropology, ed. J.R. Farris and C. Taliaferro, 27–44. Oxon, New York: Abingdon.
Cooper, John W. 2000. Body, soul, and life everlasting: Biblical anthropology and monism-dualism debate. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans.
Coughlin, John J. 2003. Canon law and the human person. Journal of Law & Religion 19: 1–58. https://doi.org/10.2307/3649158.
D’Agostino, Francesco, ed. 1984. Diritto e Corporeità. Milano: Jaca Book.
De Baets, Antoon. 2016. A historian’s view on the right to be forgotten. International Review of Law, Computers & Technology 30 (1–2): 57–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600869.2015.1125155.
De Luca, Nicoletta. 1984. Anima est plus quam corpus. Milan: Giuffré Editore.
De Terwangne, Cécile. 2012. Internet privacy and the right to be forgotten/right to oblivion. In “VII International conference on internet, law & politics. Net neutrality and other challenges for the future of the Internet” [monograph online]. IDP. Revista de Internet, Derecho y Política. 13: 109–121. UOC.
Della Morte, Gabriele. 2014. International law between the duty of memory and the right to oblivion. International Criminal Law Review 14 (2014): 427–440.
Dennett, Daniel. 1991. Consciousness explained. London: Penguin Books.
Dennett, Daniel. 2003. Explaining the “magic” of consciousness. Journal of Cultural and Evolutionary Psychology 1 (1): 7–19.
Dewey, John. 1926. The historic background of corporate legal personality. Yale Law Journal 36 (6): 655–673.
Dewey, John. 1989 (Or. 1939). Freedom and culture. Amherst: Prometheus Books.
Di Paolo, Ezequiel, Anne De Jaegher, and Cuffari Elena. 2018. Linguistic bodies. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.
Di Paolo, Ezequiel. 2020. Enactive becoming. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09654-1.
Dillon, William. 1896. Bequests for masses for the souls of deceased persons: An examination of the present conditions of the law in the United States regarding the validity of bequests of this character. Chicago: Hyland.
Docksey, Christopher. 2022. Journalism on trial and the right to be forgotten. Verfassungsblog.de. Available at: https://verfassungsblog.de/journalism-rtbf/.
Eliade, Mircea. 1963. The sacred and the profane. The nature of religion. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.
ESD-Edizioni Studio Domenicano. 2007. Le dimensioni dell’uomo. Spirito, Anima, Corpo, in Divus Thomas.1.
Falzea, Angelo. 1939. Il soggetto nel sistema dei fenomeni giuridici. Milan: Giuffrè.
Floridi, Luciano, ed. 2015. The onlife manifesto. Being human in a hyperconnected era. Cham: Springer.
Frantizou, Eleni. 2014. Further developments in the right to be forgotten: The European court of justice’s judgment in case C-131/12, Google Spain, SL, Google Inc v Agencia Espanola de Proteccion de Datos. Human Rights Law Review 14 (4): 761–777. https://doi.org/10.1093/hrlr/ngu033.
Freddoso, Alfred J. 2002. Good news, your soul hasn’t died quite yet. American Catholic Philosophical Association, Proceedings of the ACPA 75: 99–120.
Frenkel, Sheera, and Thompson, Stuart A. ‘Not for Machines to Harvest’: Data Revolts Break Out Against A.I. July 15, 2023, The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/15/technology/artificial-intelligence-models-chat-data.html. Accessed 14 Nov 2023.
Gallese, Vittorio. 2018. Embodied simulation and its role in cognition. Reti, saperi, linguaggi 1/2018 7 (13): 31–46.
Gomes de Andrade, Norberto Nuno. 2009. Striking a balance between property and personality. The case of the Avatars. Cultures of Virtual Worlds, 1 (3), February 2009.
Gooding, Francis. 2023. Orca life. London Review of Books 45 (18): 7.
Green, Joel B. 2008. Body, soul and human life: The nature of humanity in the Bible. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academics.
Grstein, Oskar J. 2022. Right to be Forgotten: EU-ropean Data Imperialism, National Privilege, or Universal Human Right? (February 20, 2020). Review of European Administrative Law (2020/1) pp. 125–152. https://doi.org/10.7590/187479820X15881424928426
Guelfi, Francesco Filomusi. Delle disposizioni per l’anima o a favore dell’anima nel diritto civile italiano, in Riv. Ital. per le Scienze Giuridiche, I, fasc. 1, 1.
Gunkel, David J. 2018. The other question: Can and should robots have rights? Ethics and Information Technology 2018 (20): 87–99.
Hamilton, Sheryl N. 2009. Impersonations. Troubling the person in law and culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. A Cyborg manifesto. Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature, 149–181. New York: Routledge.
Harris, Oliver, and Robb, John. 2012. Multiple ontologies and the problem of the body in history. American Anthropologist, 114 (4): 668–679, ISSN 0002–7294, online ISSN 1548–1433.
Iglezakis, Ionnis. 2014. The right to be forgotten in the google spain case (case C-131/12): A clear victory for data protection or an obstacle for the internet? Paper presented at the 4th International Conference on Information Law.
Ingold, Tim. 2022. Imagining for real: Essays on creation, attention and correspondence. Abingdon: Routledge.
Kapica, Steven S. 2014. I don’t feel like a copy’: Post-human legal personhood and Caprica. Griffith Law Review. 23 (4): 612–633. https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2014.1014454.
Krauss, Ruth. 1952/1989. A hole is to dig. Harper Trophy.
Latour, Bruno. 2010. On the modern cult of the factish gods. Trans. Heather MacLean and Cathy Porter. Durham: Duke University Press.
Lingel, Jessa. 2013. The digital remains: Social media and practices of online grief. The Information Society 29: 190–195, Routledge.
Lo Castro, Gaetano. 1974. Personalità morale e soggettività giuridica nel diritto canonico (Contributo allo studio delle persone morali). Milan: Giuffrè.
Lo Castro, Gaetano. 2011. Il mistero del diritto. Vol. II. Persona e diritto nella Chiesa. Torino: Giappichelli.
Lo Castro, Gaetano. 1985. Il soggetto e i suoi diritti nell’ordinamento canonico. Milan: Giuffrè.
Lopucki, Lynn. 2018. Algorithmic entities. Washington University Law Review 95 (1): 1–66.
Marmion, Declan, and Rik van Nieuwenhove. 2011. An introduction to the trinity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Massen, Jorg J.M.., and Andrew G. Gallup. 2017. Why contagious yawning does not (yet) equate to empathy. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 80 (2017): 573–585.
Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor. 2011. Delete: The virtue of forgetting in the digital age. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Meese, James, et al. 2015. Posthumous personhood and the affordances of digital media. Mortality 20 (4): 408–420. https://doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2015.1083724.
Meltzer, Abraham C. 2022. When an algorithm violates the law: Deconstructing a study supposedly showing that an artificial intelligence algorithm makes better bail decisions than do judges. Syracuse Journal of Science and Technology Law, (JOST) 38 (2022–2023): 3–17.
Midson, Scott A. 2018. Cyborg theology: Humans, Technology and God. London: I.B. Tauris & Co., Ltd.
Mytum, Harold. 2006. Popular attitudes to memory, the body, and social identity: The rise of external commemoration in Britain Ireland and New England. Post-Medieval Archaeology 40/1 (2006): 96–110.
Nash, Roderick Frazier. 1989. The rights of nature. A history of environmental ethics. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Öhman, Carl, and Luciano Floridi. 2018. An ethical framework for the digital afterlife industry. Nature Human Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0335-2.
Otto, Rudolf. 1959. The idea of the holy: An inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the Rational, Trans. J.W. Harvey. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Page, Stephanie T., John K. Amory, and William J. Bremner. 2008. Advances in male contraception. Endocrine Reviews 29 (4): 465–493. https://doi.org/10.1210/er.2007-0041.
Phan, Peter C., ed. 2011. The Cambridge companion to the trinity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Repole, Roberto, ed. 2018. Il corpo alla prova dell’antropologia. Milan: Glossa.
Ricca, Mario. 2022. Intercultural spaces of law. Translating Invisibilities. Cham: Springer.
Ricca, Mario. 2022. The ‘Spaghettification’ of performativity across cultural boundaries: The trans-culturality/trans-spatiality of digital communication as an event horizon for speech acts. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-021-09880-4.
Ricca, Mario. 2023. Fenomenologia del sacro e filogenesi del soggetto di diritto. Sui sentieri antropologico-culturali della capacità giuridica. Calumet Intercultural Law and Humanities Review. Published online May 12, 2023.
Ries, Julien. 1995. L’homo religiosus e l’uomo nuovo nel diritto della Chiesa. Diritto canonico e antropologia cristiana. In Antropologia, fede e diritto ecclesiale, ed. Bertolino et al., 33–44. Milano: Jaca Book.
Roundtree, Cheyenne. 2023. Hollywood’s fight against AI puts background actors in the spotlight. Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/hollywood-actors-strike-ai-background-visual-effects-sag-aftra-1234792405/ Accessed 14 Nov 2023.
Schwitzgebel, Eric. 2023. The full rights dilemma for A.I. systems of debatable personhood. ROBONOMICS: The Journal of the Automated Economy 4 (2023): 1–18.
Scola, Angelo, Gilfredo Marengo, and Javier Prades. 2000. La persona umana. Antropologia teologica. Milano: Jaca Book.
Spadaro, Antonio. 2014. Cybertheology: Thinking christianity in the era of the internet. New York: Fordham University Press.
Stokes, Jonathan M., Kevin Yang, et al. 2020. A deep learning approach to antibiotic discovery. Cell 180: 4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.01.021.
Stone, Christopher D. 2010. (or. 1972 Should trees have standing? Law, morality, and the environment). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Švorcová, Jana. 2023. Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance of traumatic experience in mammals. Genes 14 (120): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.3390/genes14010120.
Symes, Jack, ed. 2022. Philosophers on consciousness. Talking about mind. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Thweatt-Bates, Jeanine. 2012. Cyborg selves. A theological anthropology of the posthuman. Surrey: Ashgate.
Tierney, Brian. 1997. The idea of natural rights: Studies on natural rights, natural law, and church law 1150–1625. Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing Company.
Toobin, Jeffrey. 2018. The solace of oblivion. In Europe, the right to be forgotten trumps the Internet. The New Yorker, Annals of Law, September 29, 2014 Issue.
Valvo, Anna Lucia. 2015. The right to be forgotten in the era of ‘digital’ information. European Integration Studies, 2 (2015).
Vazquez, Melisa. 2019. Secularisms, religions and law. A legal-cultural inquiry. Palermo: Torri del Vento.
Vazquez, Melisa. 2020. Culture, religion and the new geographies of law. Troubling takedowns in ‘Ewa Glawischnig-Piesczek v. Facebook Ireland Ltd.’ Calumet Intercultural Law and Humanities Review. Published online February 11, 2020.
Waters, Brent. 2016. From human to posthuman: Christian theology and technology in a postmodern world. Abingdon: Routledge.
Wolynn, Mark. 2016. It didn’t start with you. How inherited familly trauma shapes who you are and how to end the cycle. London: Penguin Life.
Zolla, Elèmire. 1992. Uscite dal mondo. Milano: Adelphi.
Zweig, Paul. 1969/1980. The heresy of self-love. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Vazquez, M.L. Neither Matter Nor Spirit: The Ambivalent Substance of Digital Legal Personhood and Its Theological Antecedents. Int J Semiot Law (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10084-1
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-023-10084-1