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Option 3: the experience of being disconnected from your body is so distressing that you can do nothing but attempt (and fail) to scream. The scientists have no

Option 3: the experience of being disconnected from your body is so distressing that you can do nothing but attempt (and fail) to scream. The scientists have no idea you are in distress. This goes on for months or years. By the time technology develops to a point where they can communicate with you, you are irreparably broken.

Darkphibre 8y ago
Couldn't they monitor brain activity for common pain modalities?
- SkyBelow 8y ago
  They currently ignore them. Not talking fantasy. When beating heart corpses (technically brain dead but body is alive) have their organs removed, in some cases the bodies go through symptoms of a live human being killed by vivisection. These are generally ignored. Let's hope our understanding of brain death is fully and completely correct.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    Years ago, I saw a TV interview of the first recipient of a heart-lung transplant. When asked some question post surgery, she blurted "I could really use a beer!" She didn't drink, but the young male donor of her organs who died in a motorcycle crash did. She wrote a book about her experience. Initially, she had bizarre dreams, as if tapping into the psyche of her organ donor. Over time, those stopped. Mention of this tends to not go over well on HN, though it would be easy enough to google who got the first heart-lung transplant, find her book and read it to confirm if I'm making this up or misremembering it or if it's a true story (at least insofar as me remembering that she claimed such things).
    - ben_w 8y ago
      Given how much my personality shifts from relatively minor things like switching between high/low carb diets, or medium things like whatever was in my drip when I went under general anaesthetic, I totally believe that her personality was changed by having a transplant, or separately by her anti-rejection meds. I’d be surprised if most such changes have statistically strong correlation with organ donor personalities.
      - DoreenMichele 8y ago
        I totally believe that her personality was changed by having a transplant, or separately by her anti-rejection meds. Thanks. I’d be surprised if most such changes have statistically strong correlation with organ donor personalities. So would I. I'm not talking about most such changes or statistical significance. I'm talking about one specific case that was unusually well documented and highly scrutinized that potentially supports the idea that "souls" -- or something we might describe with that word -- might actually be real. A high percentage of people go to church or otherwise have some kind of spiritual belief. But some kind of scientific affirmation that this isn't simply adult thumb sucking and there may be something to it seems pretty uncommon. I found her story interesting from that angle. But, I mean, if your mind is made up that souls are nonsense, then you are probably not the target audience for my comment.
        dragonwriter 8y ago
        Personality transfer by transfer of parts of the body other than the brain, even if it was clear from h evidence, isn't scientific affirmation of the soul, it's scientific reinforcement that the “self” is contained in the body not some separate soul. It contradicts the understanding that the seat of the self in the body is solely and exclusively the brain, but that doesn't support the idea of the soul.
        DoreenMichele 8y ago
        Not enough qualifiers for you? Putting souls in quotation marks and adding or something we might describe with that word wasn't adequate?
  - estsauver 8y ago
    I'm interested in reading more, do you have a source?
    - SkyBelow 8y ago
      I would suggest googling variants of beating heart corpse, beating heart donor, and similar terms. I also caution to check the sources of the websites as some of them are very anti-organ donation and are quite biased beyond hope. Here is a past discussion of a BBC article related to the subject, about 2.5 years old. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12931113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12931113
  - Doxin 8y ago
    What sort of symptoms are we talking here? There's rather a marked difference between "screaming loudly" and "bleeding" as an indicator of pain.
imrelaxed 8y ago
Unlikely, it’s probably a lot like a sensory deprivation tank. You likely start to hallucinate after a period of time and deteriorate to some strange state of existence.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  It turns out to be extremely hard to confirm that this hasn't already happened.
  - Jaruzel 8y ago
    The obvious extrapolation is that we're all now brains in jars, and this existence we perceive is a shared hallucination brought on by the jars all being connected to the same keep-the-brains-alive-system.
chr1 8y ago
In all cases i would not lose anything, because i would have already lost everything when dying. So in all cases it's a bonus time, and though being properly resurrected would be great, helping scientific progress and dying is still better than simply dying.
- kbenson 8y ago
  That's very optimistic of you. I can definitely think of a few situations in which I would be better off without that "bonus time". I'm not sure we have enough information to know how a brain would perceive being activated but without most it's sensory organs and the busy it was grown in. If you're used for experimentation before they have a way to communicate, stuck in void with only yourself for company is really a best case scenario. It's sort of like being given a choice at the time of death. Would you rather everything ended now, or do you want to opt for a small chance at future life if there's also a chance that life consists entirely of torture of one type or another.
  - chr1 8y ago
    It is not about optimism, my point is that pain, torture, death are bad because they deprive you of future possibilities. If you are already dead, you do not have any future to lose, and in that case if your torture can help others, the rational choice is to help.
    - kbenson 8y ago
      > pain, torture, death are bad because they deprive you of future possibilities Death does. Pain and torture don't deprive you of your future. They are all about what you have to go through to get to that future, and possibly alter how you are physically and/or mentally in that future. At an extreme end of the spectrum is complete brain death, but just before that might be extreme brain damage. Would you choose a reality in which you're so mentally diminished that your existence is comprised entirely of terror and confusion? Opting into that, even the possibility of that, especially since once you're in that state, you may no longer be capable of changing your mind? Even for people that don't believe in the religious version of hell, some might consider this the closest equivalent. The question then becomes, would you subject yourself to the possibility of being in a hell equivalent for an indeterminate amount of time after your death to provide an indeterminate amount of benefit to science? > If you are already dead, you do not have any future to lose That assumption only works if you assume you can't be brought back, even as a brain in a jar. It doesn't make sense to use assumptions based on death being the ultimate end when reasoning about death not being the ultimate end. > If you are already dead, you do not have any future to lose, and in that case if your torture can help others, the rational choice is to help. By that reasoning, if there was a program where you could donate your body to science while you're still alive and they could do any tests they want, including live vivisection, would you do so? If not, why is that any different?

Darkphibre 8y ago

Couldn't they monitor brain activity for common pain modalities?

SkyBelow 8y ago
They currently ignore them. Not talking fantasy. When beating heart corpses (technically brain dead but body is alive) have their organs removed, in some cases the bodies go through symptoms of a live human being killed by vivisection. These are generally ignored. Let's hope our understanding of brain death is fully and completely correct.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  Years ago, I saw a TV interview of the first recipient of a heart-lung transplant. When asked some question post surgery, she blurted "I could really use a beer!" She didn't drink, but the young male donor of her organs who died in a motorcycle crash did. She wrote a book about her experience. Initially, she had bizarre dreams, as if tapping into the psyche of her organ donor. Over time, those stopped. Mention of this tends to not go over well on HN, though it would be easy enough to google who got the first heart-lung transplant, find her book and read it to confirm if I'm making this up or misremembering it or if it's a true story (at least insofar as me remembering that she claimed such things).
  - ben_w 8y ago
    Given how much my personality shifts from relatively minor things like switching between high/low carb diets, or medium things like whatever was in my drip when I went under general anaesthetic, I totally believe that her personality was changed by having a transplant, or separately by her anti-rejection meds. I’d be surprised if most such changes have statistically strong correlation with organ donor personalities.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      I totally believe that her personality was changed by having a transplant, or separately by her anti-rejection meds. Thanks. I’d be surprised if most such changes have statistically strong correlation with organ donor personalities. So would I. I'm not talking about most such changes or statistical significance. I'm talking about one specific case that was unusually well documented and highly scrutinized that potentially supports the idea that "souls" -- or something we might describe with that word -- might actually be real. A high percentage of people go to church or otherwise have some kind of spiritual belief. But some kind of scientific affirmation that this isn't simply adult thumb sucking and there may be something to it seems pretty uncommon. I found her story interesting from that angle. But, I mean, if your mind is made up that souls are nonsense, then you are probably not the target audience for my comment.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        Personality transfer by transfer of parts of the body other than the brain, even if it was clear from h evidence, isn't scientific affirmation of the soul, it's scientific reinforcement that the “self” is contained in the body not some separate soul. It contradicts the understanding that the seat of the self in the body is solely and exclusively the brain, but that doesn't support the idea of the soul.
        DoreenMichele 8y ago
        Not enough qualifiers for you? Putting souls in quotation marks and adding or something we might describe with that word wasn't adequate?
- estsauver 8y ago
  I'm interested in reading more, do you have a source?
  - SkyBelow 8y ago
    I would suggest googling variants of beating heart corpse, beating heart donor, and similar terms. I also caution to check the sources of the websites as some of them are very anti-organ donation and are quite biased beyond hope. Here is a past discussion of a BBC article related to the subject, about 2.5 years old. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12931113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12931113
- Doxin 8y ago
  What sort of symptoms are we talking here? There's rather a marked difference between "screaming loudly" and "bleeding" as an indicator of pain.

imrelaxed 8y ago

Unlikely, it’s probably a lot like a sensory deprivation tank. You likely start to hallucinate after a period of time and deteriorate to some strange state of existence.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
It turns out to be extremely hard to confirm that this hasn't already happened.
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  The obvious extrapolation is that we're all now brains in jars, and this existence we perceive is a shared hallucination brought on by the jars all being connected to the same keep-the-brains-alive-system.

chr1 8y ago

In all cases i would not lose anything, because i would have already lost everything when dying. So in all cases it's a bonus time, and though being properly resurrected would be great, helping scientific progress and dying is still better than simply dying.

kbenson 8y ago
That's very optimistic of you. I can definitely think of a few situations in which I would be better off without that "bonus time". I'm not sure we have enough information to know how a brain would perceive being activated but without most it's sensory organs and the busy it was grown in. If you're used for experimentation before they have a way to communicate, stuck in void with only yourself for company is really a best case scenario. It's sort of like being given a choice at the time of death. Would you rather everything ended now, or do you want to opt for a small chance at future life if there's also a chance that life consists entirely of torture of one type or another.
- chr1 8y ago
  It is not about optimism, my point is that pain, torture, death are bad because they deprive you of future possibilities. If you are already dead, you do not have any future to lose, and in that case if your torture can help others, the rational choice is to help.
  - kbenson 8y ago
    > pain, torture, death are bad because they deprive you of future possibilities Death does. Pain and torture don't deprive you of your future. They are all about what you have to go through to get to that future, and possibly alter how you are physically and/or mentally in that future. At an extreme end of the spectrum is complete brain death, but just before that might be extreme brain damage. Would you choose a reality in which you're so mentally diminished that your existence is comprised entirely of terror and confusion? Opting into that, even the possibility of that, especially since once you're in that state, you may no longer be capable of changing your mind? Even for people that don't believe in the religious version of hell, some might consider this the closest equivalent. The question then becomes, would you subject yourself to the possibility of being in a hell equivalent for an indeterminate amount of time after your death to provide an indeterminate amount of benefit to science? > If you are already dead, you do not have any future to lose That assumption only works if you assume you can't be brought back, even as a brain in a jar. It doesn't make sense to use assumptions based on death being the ultimate end when reasoning about death not being the ultimate end. > If you are already dead, you do not have any future to lose, and in that case if your torture can help others, the rational choice is to help. By that reasoning, if there was a program where you could donate your body to science while you're still alive and they could do any tests they want, including live vivisection, would you do so? If not, why is that any different?