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The article mentions "ethical implications" a few times, but doesn't really hint at anything potentially negative. Obviously the potential to save or prolong li

The article mentions "ethical implications" a few times, but doesn't really hint at anything potentially negative. Obviously the potential to save or prolong lives is an enormous potential benefit, and any negative consequences would need to be elaborated on to be weighed against it. Is it just that the technology smells like scary sci-fi stuff?

joe_the_user 9y ago
"The ethical implications are left as exercise for the reader". Keeping a brain alive outside the body might be have the problem that it in constant pain and unable to act in the world in any meaningful way. What more terrifying experience could imagine than being aware and utterly "disembodied"? But then again, it might have the implication that the brain might installed in a new body with the slight problem that existing brain is evicted. Sure, some healthy bodies with dysfunctional brains can be found but that's only a short term problem. Nothing that hasn't covered by the scariest horror movies you can think of. The movie "get out" occurs to me - old people parasitizing younger bodies, rich people parasitizing poorer bodies, etc.
- gtirloni 9y ago
  "Altered Carbon" also poses this problem.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  "in constant pain and unable to act in the world in any meaningful way" This is how many factory farmed animals already live. Where is the outrage?
  - sizzle 9y ago
    Great point, reminded me of the stress hormones that their animal brains release into the meat I mindlessly consume. I think I'm gonna be vegetarian for a while...
lostlogin 9y ago
CPR can be ethically complicated, this is a step more so. How does consent work? Who can give it? What if the revived brain somehow asks to be switched off - is that suicide or assisted suicide or neither? Does it have rights? Property rights? Can it make decisions about the things it owns? How do those decisions get authorised?
- homonculus1 9y ago
  Why should any of those answers be different than for a person under normal circumstances?
  - lostlogin 9y ago
    Euthanasia isn’t legal many places and life as a brain is probably not for everyone. How do you communicate with it or know what it wants. How does that get into a legal document. There is little about it that is comparable with a normal human existence.
thaumaturgy 9y ago
One group of concerns is probably around unintentional harms -- for instance, only discovering much later that the process causes the brain to experience unimaginable pain or fear and without any way to communicate it or take action against it or even escape it by dying. It would be a form of hell that should terrify even the most stalwart of us. The other would be intentional harm. Imagining the technology developing into the hopefully-far future, it's fair to also imagine interest from organizations like the CIA, who are so very fond of finding new ways to cruelly torture people while pretending they get good intelligence from it.
- saulrh 9y ago
  I'm surprised that nobody's pointed out how... breathlessly far-fetched both of those scenarios are? You'd find out the "unimaginable pain and fear" thing the first time you woke someone up, and standard anesthesia already has this issue. And for the CIA, wouldn't "take out their brain and hook wires into it" kind of constitute "major surgery without consent or medical reason"?
  - theonemind 9y ago
    We haven't reached the point of waking anyone up. Presumably, if this progresses, they could perhaps get better/more life-like/normal brainwave patterns, and THEN you have to work out I/O, like communication. So, I don't see that as far-fetched at all in the intermediate stages of developing it in a practical direction. As for the CIA, MKULTRA? Bay of Pigs? Drug trafficking? You seem to imply a simple ethical boundary would stop them. I don't see much historical basis for believing that.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Anyone get that Metallica(?) video going through their head, about the soldier?
  - thaumaturgy 9y ago
    They are approximately as far-fetched as the ideas that AI will eventually destroy humanity or GMO crops will cause ecosystem collapse. Which is to say, it takes a new technology and contextualizes it with past bad behavior to try to imagine what the worst possible future looks like. If this technology is developed further and eventually becomes available to more than a tiny number of people, I don't think we can guess what the positive or negative effects on society will be. We never can; we live in a surveillance state, but it doesn't look like Orwell's 1984. We have advanced technology that the dreamers of the 1950s never foresaw, but no jetpacks or flying cars -- just miniaturized, globally-connected pocket computers designed to capture as much attention as possible. The global climate has continued to worsen since alarms were broadly sounded in the 1980s, but most of us that have the luxury of discussing the topic are sitting in nice little homes and offices and blissfully untouched by it all. We have high-tech network-connected systems and a mix of severely concentrated wealth and a much larger impoverished group, but none of this looks like cyberpunk genre fiction. Bad futures tend to happen gently enough for them to seem perfectly acceptable. A lot of people even come to defend them.
rocqua 9y ago
Is a disembodied but conscious human brain a pig? If so, suppose it is in pain? It certainly stands to reason that a brain without a body would be very confused. At the very least, fear would be a logical reaction. None of this is certain, but I think little of this is very controversial.
fencepost 9y ago
Is prolonged solitary confinement considered torture? How about if it's in a sensory deprivation tank? Then add paralytics. Now contemplate consciousness with no sensory input at all (not even your own heartbeat or normal bodily sensations when you move, etc.) leaving only whatever phantom sensation the traumatized nerves generate, like amputees' phantom limbs and phantom pain, but for your only sensation. On an individual basis this may be the most terrifying thing I could ever imagine.
vivekd 9y ago
This is the part I'm wondering about - my uncle died of a malignant brain tumor recently. I wonder if it would be possible to use a technique like this to transplant parts of a healthy donor brain to his brain. I read about two being done on wikipedia but it seems like something that is largely out of reach for now.
- p1esk 9y ago
  I think it might be easier to transplant a whole brain than to transplant a part of a brain. I'm not even sure the latter is possible at all.

joe_the_user 9y ago

"The ethical implications are left as exercise for the reader". Keeping a brain alive outside the body might be have the problem that it in constant pain and unable to act in the world in any meaningful way. What more terrifying experience could imagine than being aware and utterly "disembodied"? But then again, it might have the implication that the brain might installed in a new body with the slight problem that existing brain is evicted. Sure, some healthy bodies with dysfunctional brains can be found but that's only a short term problem. Nothing that hasn't covered by the scariest horror movies you can think of. The movie "get out" occurs to me - old people parasitizing younger bodies, rich people parasitizing poorer bodies, etc.

gtirloni 9y ago
"Altered Carbon" also poses this problem.
pmoriarty 9y ago
"in constant pain and unable to act in the world in any meaningful way" This is how many factory farmed animals already live. Where is the outrage?
- sizzle 9y ago
  Great point, reminded me of the stress hormones that their animal brains release into the meat I mindlessly consume. I think I'm gonna be vegetarian for a while...

lostlogin 9y ago

CPR can be ethically complicated, this is a step more so. How does consent work? Who can give it? What if the revived brain somehow asks to be switched off - is that suicide or assisted suicide or neither? Does it have rights? Property rights? Can it make decisions about the things it owns? How do those decisions get authorised?

homonculus1 9y ago
Why should any of those answers be different than for a person under normal circumstances?
- lostlogin 9y ago
  Euthanasia isn’t legal many places and life as a brain is probably not for everyone. How do you communicate with it or know what it wants. How does that get into a legal document. There is little about it that is comparable with a normal human existence.

thaumaturgy 9y ago

One group of concerns is probably around unintentional harms -- for instance, only discovering much later that the process causes the brain to experience unimaginable pain or fear and without any way to communicate it or take action against it or even escape it by dying. It would be a form of hell that should terrify even the most stalwart of us. The other would be intentional harm. Imagining the technology developing into the hopefully-far future, it's fair to also imagine interest from organizations like the CIA, who are so very fond of finding new ways to cruelly torture people while pretending they get good intelligence from it.

saulrh 9y ago
I'm surprised that nobody's pointed out how... breathlessly far-fetched both of those scenarios are? You'd find out the "unimaginable pain and fear" thing the first time you woke someone up, and standard anesthesia already has this issue. And for the CIA, wouldn't "take out their brain and hook wires into it" kind of constitute "major surgery without consent or medical reason"?
- theonemind 9y ago
  We haven't reached the point of waking anyone up. Presumably, if this progresses, they could perhaps get better/more life-like/normal brainwave patterns, and THEN you have to work out I/O, like communication. So, I don't see that as far-fetched at all in the intermediate stages of developing it in a practical direction. As for the CIA, MKULTRA? Bay of Pigs? Drug trafficking? You seem to imply a simple ethical boundary would stop them. I don't see much historical basis for believing that.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Anyone get that Metallica(?) video going through their head, about the soldier?
- thaumaturgy 9y ago
  They are approximately as far-fetched as the ideas that AI will eventually destroy humanity or GMO crops will cause ecosystem collapse. Which is to say, it takes a new technology and contextualizes it with past bad behavior to try to imagine what the worst possible future looks like. If this technology is developed further and eventually becomes available to more than a tiny number of people, I don't think we can guess what the positive or negative effects on society will be. We never can; we live in a surveillance state, but it doesn't look like Orwell's 1984. We have advanced technology that the dreamers of the 1950s never foresaw, but no jetpacks or flying cars -- just miniaturized, globally-connected pocket computers designed to capture as much attention as possible. The global climate has continued to worsen since alarms were broadly sounded in the 1980s, but most of us that have the luxury of discussing the topic are sitting in nice little homes and offices and blissfully untouched by it all. We have high-tech network-connected systems and a mix of severely concentrated wealth and a much larger impoverished group, but none of this looks like cyberpunk genre fiction. Bad futures tend to happen gently enough for them to seem perfectly acceptable. A lot of people even come to defend them.

rocqua 9y ago

Is a disembodied but conscious human brain a pig? If so, suppose it is in pain? It certainly stands to reason that a brain without a body would be very confused. At the very least, fear would be a logical reaction. None of this is certain, but I think little of this is very controversial.

fencepost 9y ago

Is prolonged solitary confinement considered torture? How about if it's in a sensory deprivation tank? Then add paralytics. Now contemplate consciousness with no sensory input at all (not even your own heartbeat or normal bodily sensations when you move, etc.) leaving only whatever phantom sensation the traumatized nerves generate, like amputees' phantom limbs and phantom pain, but for your only sensation. On an individual basis this may be the most terrifying thing I could ever imagine.

vivekd 9y ago

This is the part I'm wondering about - my uncle died of a malignant brain tumor recently. I wonder if it would be possible to use a technique like this to transplant parts of a healthy donor brain to his brain. I read about two being done on wikipedia but it seems like something that is largely out of reach for now.

p1esk 9y ago
I think it might be easier to transplant a whole brain than to transplant a part of a brain. I'm not even sure the latter is possible at all.