Abstract
In this chapter, we briefly consider what is meant by virtual and hybrid cyber-criminologies (Brown), and then move on to examine the latest version of Owen’s (2014) Genetic-Social framework, which incorporates several new metaconcepts since the publication of the work of Owen (2014) and Owen and Owen (2015) which include Tim Owen’s concept of neuro-agency and Martin Heidegger’s concepts of Dasein and ontic truth. This is a ‘taster’ of the full codification and application of the sensitising framework in the final chapter. We then ‘apply’ some of the metaconcepts, which now incorporate insights from neuroscience (Dennett 1981; Dennett et al. 2007; Moll et al. 2005) and the philosophy of Heidegger (2010) to the study of these recent forms of criminological theorising pertaining to cybercrime. It is contended that virtual and hybrid cyber-criminologies should be rejected in favour of concepts of neuro-agency and psychobiography. The former metaconcept reflects the idea that when considering ‘Who is in charge?’, one should keep firmly in mind that human beings (Dasein) are the product of natural selection, a cocktail of the mutuality between genes and environment, and we must acknowledge the neuroscience of free-will (agency) and the evolved nature of moral reasoning. The latter metaconcept, psychobiography, refers to the asocial, inherited aspects of the person or disposition. Machinery and cyber technology may simulate a ‘merging’ between the human and the technical, but in the harsh light of a Heideggarian theory of pure surface, no cyborg or machine can ever qualify as Dasein. As Heidegger (2010) made clear, the human being is not an isolated subject removed from the realm of objects, but that does not mean that we can ‘merge’ with the non-human, as Brown (2006, 2013) appears to suggest. For Heidegger, being is time, to be a human being is to exist temporally between birth and death. No cyborg or machine can function without being programmed by human neuro-agency, and no cyborg or machine has the cognition to formulate and act upon decisions. It is the human being (Dasein) that can do so, and only the human being has a self capable of being what it is through confronting the reality of death. No cyborg has the capacity to grasp this finitude and ‘become who one is’.
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Owen, T. (2017). Do We Need a ‘Virtual Criminology’?. In: Crime, Genes, Neuroscience and Cyberspace. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52688-5_4
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