It’s straight out of a sci-fi movie.

Except it’s Elon Musk’s latest Neuralink demo: touting whole-brain data streams that could let humans communicate “thousands, perhaps millions of times faster” and even restore motion to the paralyzed and sight to the blind. 

Last year, Neuralink became the first company to implant a brain chip in a human patient. In July, the company announced it now has seven clinical-trial patients with ALS and paralyzing spine injuries equipped with the coin-sized implant, allowing them to type, browse and play chess on their devices, merely by way of thought — benchmarks Musk considered rudimentary in comparison to the ambitious milestones he plans to pass prior to commercial rollout of the technology by 2028.

Musk’s latest “Neuralink Update, Summer 2025” and his vision of realizing “a fundamental change to what it means to be a human” poses challenging anthropological questions for the Catholic Church to answer as the technology marches forward. Pope Leo XIV, building upon the work of his papal predecessors, already has begun to formulate a response to the advances of artificial intelligence, stressing that any technological advancement must be evaluated “in light of the integral development of the human person and society.” 

“AI, especially Generative AI, has opened new horizons on many different levels, including enhancing research in healthcare and scientific discovery,” the Pope said in a message to participants of this summer’s AI conference at the Vatican. Yet he acknowledged AI “also raises troubling questions on its possible repercussions on humanity’s openness to truth and beauty, on our distinctive ability to grasp and process reality.” 

Neuralink’s Demo

Neuralink, started by Musk in 2016, builds and surgically inserts brain-computer interfaces that let people control a computer or device just by thinking. Since 2016, the device, considered useful for its medical utilities, has quickly advanced, and the company envisions a future in which thought-guided computing becomes an integrated aspect of daily life.

Musk touted his vision of reality in an hour-long video, released in July, that demonstrates how Neuralink’s brain-computer interface is aiding clinical trial patients through the use of “conceptual telepathy.” He also explored how the associated increase of the brain’s processing speeds might aid anyone.

“Your ability to communicate is very limited by how fast you can talk and how fast you can type,” Musk said. “And what we’re talking about is unlocking that potential to enable you to communicate … thousands, perhaps millions of times faster than is currently possible.” 

During his latest update video, Musk explained that increasing the human brain’s “input/output bandwidth” will allow it “to match the will of artificial intelligence.”

He also raised rhetorical questions about the nature of consciousness and being and proposed his answer: “I mean, we are the brain. Basically … you can get a heart transplant, you can get a kidney transplant, but I don’t know anyone who’s gotten a brain transplant. So, you are your brain.”

A Catholic Response

Some Catholic ethicists have taken issue with Musk’s vision of a new, superior way of being human, particularly because of how it conflates being human with brain and body function. 

Steven Umbrello, the managing director at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in Willington, Connecticut, and a research fellow at the University of Turin, told the Register in an email that “Musk repeats a familiar claim: ‘You are your brain.’ This is typical materialist nonsense, and it is unfounded and reductionistic.”

“It’s true that brain function is integral to cognition, but it does not exhaust what it means to be a person,” said Umbrello. “Consciousness, intentionality and moral responsibility point to a deeper ontological reality that can’t be reduced to neural activity.”

Umbrello contrasted Musk’s transhumanist vision with the Catholic view of the human person as a unity of body and soul.

“Catholic philosophy has long distinguished between the subjective interiority of the soul and the objective mechanisms of the body,” he said. “The Neuralink project, however, tends to collapse these two into one, which, unsurprisingly, is a move that flattens the human person into data. The risk here is both philosophical error as well as the erosion of moral categories like responsibility, love and suffering.”

He added: “Our Catholic anthropology insists that human identity is not derivative of utility. It is rooted in our being created imago Dei.”

Other Catholic ethicists agree. Back in 2023, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Neuralink’s clinical trials for the brain-computer interface device, the National Catholic Bioethics Center, a Philadelphia-based organization that provides ethical guidance to the U.S. bishops and Catholic health-care providers, raised a red flag. 

Joseph Meaney, a senior fellow for the NCBC, wrote in an essay that while “treating the brain-injured or enabling the paralyzed to walk are certainly good goals,” Musk’s ultimate goal of connecting a person’s mind to artificial intelligence in order to “create a ‘superhuman’ is an attack on the sacred inviolability of the human person.” 

“There is no anti‑science agenda in the cautious attitude of the Church,” Meaney emphasized, “but prudential and ethical considerations must be made of all the possible uses of a certain technology.”

Secular Ethical Caution

Arthur Caplan, one of the leading secular bioethicists in the country and an adviser to the United Nations and the World Health Organization, echoes this cautious approach. He told the Register he’s “no fan of Neuralink.”

“There are legitimate efforts to study brain modulation. Those experiments are peer reviewed; they get approved by independent people, and then they get published. That is the proper way to proceed,” he said. “Neuralink is not peer-reviewed.”

He continued: “Neuralink seems to be taking a giant step that’s not based in where the science is — it’s way too far ahead, putting massive things into the brain when the rest of the science world is putting in little key things to stimulate almost a few cells, not big portions of the brain.”

Caplan criticized what he called Neuralink’s bare‑bones regulatory framework. “Given that we’re doing brain manipulation, it needs a lot more than that,” he said.

Yet Caplan also expressed the concern that the bioethical field doesn’t have the manpower to handle all the ethical questions new technologies are posing. 

“Things are moving so fast that the science is getting way ahead of where the ethicists are thinking. And the law? Well, it’s even lagging even more,” he told the Register.

A Digital Future

Musk’s plans for cybernetically enhancing the human person are not isolated. The future ahead sees a great number of technologies like Neuralink on the horizon. ChatGPT creator OpenAI plans to invest in a brain implant startup, called Merge Labs, to compete with Neuralink, according to a report by The Independent, while Apple has patented future Airpods that scan brain activity. 

In 2023, researchers at the University of Texas published their results in developing an AI system that can decode brain activity into coherent language with 72% accuracy. That same year, Meta succeeded in developing technology able to decode brainwaves and reconstruct a rough visual representation of thoughts. And in 2024, a California start-up, REMspace succeeded in transferring ideas between two individuals in the dream state across long distance.

As data centers grow in scale and data processing speeds exponentially increase, the combination of these technologies is widely expected to reshape society with breathtaking speed. The Church has warned of such danger and is attempting to help steer that convergence so that technology remains a servant of the mystery it touches — the whole human person — before private, corporate or governmental interests set society on the path toward a far less humane design, one more akin to an episode of science-fiction dystopia.

“The Church has a responsibility to embrace scientific advances that support human dignity and healing,” researcher Steven Umbrello emphasized. “But it must also resist technological narratives that obscure what it means to be human. Musk’s vision is radically modern — materialist, progressivist and instrumental. The Church, by contrast, proposes a vision of the human person that is sacramental, relational and oriented toward communion — an inverse and authentic Trinitarian rebuttal.”

And as Pope Leo XIV stated in his message released to young pilgrims at a youth festival in Medjugorje: “No algorithm will ever replace a hug, a look, an encounter — not with God, not with our friends, not with our family.”