Neuroscience and Cybercrime

Abstract

In this chapter, we examine Owen and Owen’s (2015) metaconstruct of neuro-agency and developments in neuroscience concerning notions of free-will, embodied cognition, neuroplasticity and neuroethics in relation to cybercrime. The metaconstruct, neuro-agency is employed in Genetic-Social metatheoretical reasoning as an acknowledgement of the neural influence upon human free-will. It is contended here that it is timely and essential to acknowledge recent developments in the neuroscience of free-will and to abandon the ‘old’ term, ‘agency’. Whilst, a neural influence upon human free-will is acknowledged here, it is not argued that free-will is an illusion, as has been suggested by the hardline, determinist work of Eagleman (2001). The suggestion here is that the most convincing model of free-will, and the one which has played the most significant role in the development of Owen and Owen’s (ibid) notion of neuro-agency, is the ‘soft compatabilist’ model of free-will offered by Dennett (1981) in which a belief in both determinism and free-will is not seen as logically inconsistent. In what follows, we first examine selected examples from the literature on the subject of the ‘neuroscience of free-will’.