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Researchers are keeping pig brains alive outside the body
- Matticus_Rex 9y agoThis is a key development in my personal plan for Futurama-style immortality. Glass jar futures, anyone?
- justaman 9y agoRather die.
- mikeash 9y agoFuturama even covered that! “Interesting side note: as a head without a body, I envy the dead.”
- logfromblammo 9y agoI vaguely recall a reboot Twilight Zone or reboot Outer Limits where a rich woman paid a doctor to keep her alive by any means necessary, and ended up being just a head on a pedestal with one robot arm, that was limited in its range of motions such that it could not aim a gun at the head. And also In Fallout 4: Nuka World, where the Walt Disney expy character was just an immortal head in a tiny Vault-Tec bunker.
- kylek 9y agoGlad someone else made a futurama comment first. My first thought upon reading the title: Good news everyone!
- bigtunacan 9y agoWith a realistic enough VR and feedback environment I would take it if they could keep the essence that is me alive and able to interact with reality.
- Matticus_Rex 9y agoIf this is the bridge that gets my brain to last until brain emulation happens, I'm sooooo down.
- basementcat 9y agoMaybe this already happened to me and I didn't realize it. Apparently in my VR simulation, most major Linux distributions have adopted systemd and the UK is leaving the EU.
- Semirhage 9y agoApparently in my VR simulation, most major Linux distributions have adopted systemd and the UK is leaving the EU. So trippy! You’ll never believe mine though, Donald Trump is president of America and Dick Cheney outlived Robin Williams. I think I got a bad vat.
- rubber_duck 9y agoI don't understand how people think their there is some "essence" that is somehow disconnected from their body. Everything about your experience, selfawarenes, emotions, etc. is connected to your body. A simple physical interaction can change your mood and behavior instantly. Like getting hit or sexualy aroused, your personality can be permanently changed by hormonal changes, your mental performance is influenced by your physical fitness. Your selfimage and behavior is based heavily on your appearance (eg. one thing known to increase long term happiness is improving your attractiveness). Even if you could run your brain without your body the result would nothing like the person you are now - some traits would be preserved for sure - but imo calling that essence ignores how much subconscious/physical are a part of your personality.
- bigtunacan 9y agoThe way you re-used essence in quotes makes me think maybe you interpreted my post as meaning a metaphysical soul or something along those lines. That was not at all what I was going for. Simply taking a brain out of a body and then "keeping it on life support" would be horrendous. Think of it, your brain is very much alive with zero stimulation for a theoretical eternity. That would likely drive people insane. My point was if the technology became sufficiently advanced that we could say wire the brain into an artificial body where we could still see, communicate, maybe even feel pain and pleasure. Think of the numerous people with severe physical handicaps who might actually find something like this to be an improvement over their current living situation.
- eludwig 9y agoI don't remember the author off hand (maybe John Varley?) but there is a science fiction novel where people are kept as heads with all of their nerves hooked up in such a way that ANY sensation could be perfectly created. Needless to say, it was possible to go to some pretty dark places with this. Imagine, for example, feeling like you had to urinate but never being able to relieve yourself for all eternity. And that was one of the "lighter" abuses. shiver
- grondilu 9y agoIt's also one of the technologies pictured in the human depository[1], though. 1. http://www.earthexplodes.com/comics/200/ http://www.earthexplodes.com/comics/200/
- freeflight 9y agoThe Soviets did similar experiments, the end result was the invention of heart-lung and dialysis machines [0]. Makes one wonder what this will lead to down the road? But it will probably be a while before we get there due to ethical concerns of doing something like this with a human brain. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_the_Revival_of_Organisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_the_Revival_of_...
- andreygrehov 9y ago> Makes one wonder what this will lead to down the road? Brain as a Service?
- balabaster 9y agoRobocop
- mr_overalls 9y agoUplifted swine? Pigsmatrix?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- moh_maya 9y agoPerhaps, based on the article, a better title could be "researchers keep large fraction of brain cells alive in pig brain..." I hope they did some fMRI studies of the brains. Wonder if they just got some random noise (i.e., brain cells firing asynchronously) or if there was some discernable pattern. And if there is a pattern, then.. wow! But also, little creepy.. As an aside, I respect that the authors on the paper refused to comment on it till the paper gets reviewed / published.
- otakucode 9y agoI would be very surprised if there was any kind of pattern. Once you cut off patterned sensory input, there is no reason to believe any pattern would persist beyond that. Even meager attempts at sensory deprivation often result in quite quite dissolution of consciousness, with it only be restored upon resumption of sensory input. That combined with the fact that significant changes to our bodies and perceptive apparatus lead to significant changes in our subjective experience makes it fairly clear, to me at least, that you can't have a mind without a body perceiving and creating a feedback loop between the world and your 'self.'
- AndrewKemendo 9y agoI mean it would seem to be comparable to turning a computer on with no mouse, keyboard or screen attached (or any peripheral). The idea of a disembodied brain doesn't really make sense as the brain is only one piece of the conscious experience, you need the rest of the nervous and perception systems (or robotic proxies) for it to actually be capable of anything or respond in a way that would be illuminating to a researcher.
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoHuh. I guess in our lifetime we'll see a human brain sustained outside the body and then put back in so we can ask the person what it was like.
- booleandilemma 9y agoIt must be weird having thoughts without any sensory input whatsoever...it’s like a prison of sorts.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> It must be weird having thoughts without any sensory input whatsoever...it’s like a prison of sorts I don't know. For an uninstantiated mind, perhaps. But if you know it's temporary and know it's safe, perhaps it would be therapeutic. Or beneficial in some other way. Maybe a detached brain sleeps better. Or maybe it instantly and irreversibly goes mad.
- ramblenode 9y agoPerhaps relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition
- firethief 9y agoAt minimum it quickly gets pretty trippy. The closest human experiments I know of are dissociative hallucinogens and sensory deprivation.
- SteveJS 9y agoThoughts without sensory input is basically what people are going for when they pay money and schedule time in a float tank. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_tank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_tank
- ASalazarMX 9y agoI guess it would be maddening. At least in the tank you can still move, speak, blink, touch, breathe, etc. Much more importantly, in a vat you'd have your entire central nervous system exposed, that could be painful.
- wonderbear 9y agoEven though he says the EEG was flat: I'm mostly horrified at the idea that the pig might still be conscious. Pigs are self aware.
- colanderman 9y agoMaybe someday we as a species will evolve to a point that we recognize the immorality of experimenting on beings which are sentient but do not have the capability to consent. It boggles my mind that the learned individuals performing such experiments (and especially, the ethics boards that green-light them) fail to recognize as false the dichotomy between human and non-human sentience; but, humans have a history of performing experiments on other humans against their consent, so I shouldn't be surprised.
- burkaman 9y agoCan you define sentient? In this case I agree that pigs are obviously sentient, but do you think you could write a non-ambiguous easily-applied rule that prohibits experimenting on sentient life?
- colanderman 9y agoWikipedia has a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience Practically questions like these are decided by case law. (This is not very different than the current arguments over abortion in the US.)
- p1esk 9y agoWhat is the alternative? Let thousands of cancer victims die each year because we don’t want to test experimental cancer treatments on pigs? If your loved one was dying from cancer, and the only way to speed up the development of a cure would be testing it on animals, what would you do?
- colanderman 9y ago
- agumonkey 9y agosince when do pigs have better technology than primates ?
- pmarreck 9y agoA bit disturbingly reminiscent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Got_His_Gun
- Jun8 9y agoRather than trying to building practical pattern recognition systems using computers we can use animal brains, i.e. not models for brains, like the bee brain model http://greenbrain.group.shef.ac.uk/ http://greenbrain.group.shef.ac.uk/, but actual brains hooked up to circuitry. Or, if the whole brain is impractical, just relevant parts, e.g. the visual cortex for visual analysis. Using higher-level animals like a pig may be gross, ethically speaking but how about others, e.g. mice. Think about a visual processing unit using 1,000 mice brains harvested from embryos. I think the bottleneck here is to keep brains/tissues alive, so this research is interesting.
- chris1993 9y agoI hope there was no possibility that the brains regained consciousness in any sense, otherwise it seems like incredibly unethical experimentation.