Electric Selves: Bioelectricity, the Law, and the Limits of Consciousness
Sharvalakshana K.M
25/09/2026
This literature review examines how legal and clinical standards of personhood, responsibility, and truth have come to rely on electrical activity in the brain as a proxy for consciousness, even as neuroscience and philosophy reveal the limits of that proxy. Drawing on Benjamin Libet's readiness-potential experiments, the review first asks whether unconscious neural preparation undermines the legal assumption of conscious, deliberate choice that underlies criminal responsibility, and surveys how courts such as Roper v. Simmons have weighed neuroscience evidence against existing behavioral and developmental research. It then turns to legal definitions of personhood at the boundaries of life and consciousness: the electrical criteria used to declare brain death, the divided awareness revealed by Gazzaniga's split-brain research, and the paradox of locked-in syndrome, in which full consciousness survives behind total paralysis and is recognized only when it can be technologically demonstrated. The review further considers brain-based lie detection, contrasting the courts' rejection of fMRI evidence in United States v. Semrau with the narrower admission of EEG-based "brain fingerprinting" in Harrington v. State, to show how the Daubert standard mediates the law's uneasy relationship with reading the brain directly. Finally, the review situates these findings against David Chalmers' "hard problem" of consciousness, arguing that every legal and clinical standard examined treats electrical activity as a proxy for awareness precisely because awareness itself resists direct observation. Framed throughout by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the review concludes that law and science may be permanently limited to reading the trace of consciousness rather than consciousness itself, and that this limitation is best understood not as a temporary technological gap but as a structural feature of how electrical evidence relates to legal and moral responsibility.