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> Sestan did acknowledge that, yes, theoretically there is nothing stopping a scientist from immediately building a perfusion machine that could support a human
by no1youknowz 7y ago
> Sestan did acknowledge that, yes, theoretically there is nothing stopping a scientist from immediately building a perfusion machine that could support a human brain. The BrainEx technology is open-source, and pig and homo sapiens brains have a fair amount in common. And there are plenty of conceivable applications for a human-optimized BrainEx.
Imagine that you are a billionaire. Money is absolutely no object at all. And yet, you are in an accident. A car crash for example, your body was gravely injured but your head intact. You are flown to a facility but die on route.
This technology is a get out of jail card. What's interesting to me, is where is the cut off point. Right now I assume its within minutes? But one day it could be a week? Your head in a jar until they either create a new body for you or find a donor body?
Then there is this:
> Consider, Greely suggested, the case of the Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero and his associate, the Chinese scientist Xiaoping Ren, who claim to have transplanted a head from one cadaver to another. Undoubtedly, a scientist with fewer scruples than Sestan, fewer moral qualms about human experimentation, will emerge. “Somebody will perfuse a dead human brain, and I think it will be in an unconventional setting, not necessarily in a pure research manner,” Greely told me. “It will be somebody with a lot of money, and he’ll find a scientist willing to do it.”
Putting the current ethical concerns aside. I find this absolutely fascinating. How long until the technology is perfected and some form of immortality is reached?
How would it work. Do you get to 90 years old and they pull out your brain and put it into a newer body?
Just so happens that in 50 years I'll be 90 myself. I a more ethical version of this tech is around in some form or another. I'd love another 90 years!
Oh and for over population concerns, don't worry. I'll be happy to be part of the new expedition on Titan or Ganymede or further out. :)
- heymijo 7y ago> Your head in a jar until they either create a new body for you or find a donor body Could you imagine the horror of waking up and being just a head?
- no1youknowz 7y agoYes, it truly sounds horrific! Straight out of a nightmare movie! However I would like to think that ethical concerns would not allow this and also this research doesn't actually have this course of action in mind. When I mean head in a jar. I meant disconnected from any machinery and placed in fluids so that no more decomposition of the brain takes place. In effect, the person is still dead. No brain activity, nothing. However, when a "new body" is ready. This process is then performed and the person is given a chance at life again.
- pepr 7y agoFor me, it sure beats dying!
- solotronics 7y agoIn its current form it would probably be horrific torture at best.
- JudgeWapner 7y agodoes it? being conscious, blind, paralyzed and deaf is a preferred outcome to you?
- d1zzy 7y agoIn many places euthanasia is legal and plenty of people chose to die than continue living, that shows that there are people and situations where dying is better than living under any conditions. It's unfortunate that's the choice they are making but it may be the better choice for them. How do we know being a disconnected brain in a container is an improvement over their situation?
- the99thguy 7y agoI wonder if your brain could deal with that... If you don't emulate any sensations or bodily "communications" would your brain just snap?
- Rychard 7y agoHopefully the shock of having literally no sensory input would prevent your brain from entering such a hell. Keyboard not found Press any key to continue... >
- AstralStorm 7y agoPeople hallucinate without sensory input and some of those hallucinations can be terrifying. Read up on sensory deprivation tanks.
- api 7y agoI can imagine some really cyberpunk scenarios: "kill me... the... corporation... won't let me die... kill me...!"
- xamuel 7y agoIf you want a semi-historical platform to launch this hypothetical scenario from, Rudolf Hess would be a good example. He was imprisoned, along with other nazis, in a prison in West Berlin shortly after WWII. It was agreed that the different allied powers would take turns guarding this prison as long as prisoners remained. Fast-forward to the Cold War era, and that agreement had an unintended consequence: it gave the USSR a precious foothold in West Berlin. Thus, they vetoed every request for Rudolf Hess's release, until he died in 1987. He had been the lone inmate of the 600-cell prison for more than 20 years. Now for an alternative history twist: the Cold War never ends, and Rudolf Hess is kept alive as a brain in a vat for thousands of years, with the Russians and the Americans continuing to take turns guarding him so that both sides can cling to that sliver of West Berlin.
- dragonsngoblins 7y agoHell that pretty much straight up happens in Neuromancer, which is considered to be the codifier/originator of a huge portion of the tropes that make up cyberpunk as a genre.
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- hanniabu 7y agoReminds me of a scene from Mars Attacks
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- drtillberg 7y agoYeah, but is the brain still a billionaire when detached from a body? Sounds dead to me....
- c22 7y agoDepends on how good its attorney is. Or whether it remembers its bitcoin keys?
- drtillberg 7y agoFirst they'll have to figure out if an attorney can represent a brain as a client.
- djsumdog 7y agoSo long as the brain can pay them on retainer...
- AstralStorm 7y agoRelatively easy to do. We have patients in coma having attorneys and people with no mobility having them as well.
- umvi 7y ago> How long until the technology is perfected and some form of immortality is reached? As long as the brain remains a black box... never. We only understand a tiny bit how the brain works; the biggest problems are still unsolved. Even with a completely prosthetic body, your brain will eventually build up plaques and die (again).
- thereisnospork 7y agoMaybe evolution will solve that for us? Some people are more resistant to Alzheimers/dementia, keep enough brains alive long enough and maybe a few might have adequate plaque removal to stay sane indefinitely.
- jklinger410 7y ago>Putting the current ethical concerns aside. I find this absolutely fascinating. How long until the technology is perfected and some form of immortality is reached? No expert here, but first you are limited by cellular decay. If we can reverse engineer the aging gene and apply it to the brain, you might be right that we can stave off cell death by a lot. Then there's alzheimers and other forms of dementia, which the aging thing probably won't fix. Even if you cure alzheimers, you still have memory loss. So then we'd have to invent some type of memory therapy that defrags the brain and allows consciousness to continue to access a healthy memory bank. Not sure if you'd be able to maintain new memories, slowly lose old ones, or what. But then we could preserve consciousness. So once you perfect either controlling human memory or at least defragging it so the brain doesn't go crazy or develop dementia, you now have an immortal brain. As long as it has access to the therapy it needs, maybe could live for forever. Am I wrong here?
- keanebean86 7y agoIf you can figure out an interface you could back up memories on some non-organic system. If you split inputs to both brain and storage the brain could learn to access data from the backup when it's one memory is missing or unreliable.
- jklinger410 7y agoI guess the final question, and I forgot to address this in my initial comment, is whether or not consciousness can function with this set up at all. My bet is that insanity will creep in almost no matter what we do. Like the theories on if we got rid of sleep. Our consciousness might have developed in a way that requires a type of balance that eternal life doesn't afford. Even if you did some memory stuff, would the constant thread of consciousness be able to maintain over time? I don't know but I'm 100% sure there are people willing to find out!
- virgilp 7y agoAnd what will your brain perceive, how would you feel? Does "en eternity in hell" sound exciting? Because it might be a very real possibility.
- libertine 7y agoThis is such a weird scenario it's hard to imagine how traumatic this would be, and if it would ever be possible to regain conscience that thing would most likely be just something else other than human. According to António Damásio our conscience and memories are part of our body - the whole of it. We aren't brains mounted on a bio-mechanical motion, sensory and life support systems. People who lose a limb, or those who have spinal injuries go through such traumatic experiences, I can't imagine a glimpse of consciousness of a head..
- NotSammyHagar 7y agoIt's traumatic of course to have that happen but you still remember your life, you don't forget about first grade or something. Our mental state is affected by the health state of our bodies. I just read the wikipedia bio of Damasio, I see he's a real neuroscientist (I am not). But how can it be that our memories are not only in our brain?
- Retra 7y agoWell, it sounds more interesting and useful than death, which is the default alternative.
- thestartup 7y agoHow would a technological brain-in-a-vat hell of unending torture be "more interesting" and "useful" than death?
- Retra 7y agoHow can 0.0001 be greater than 0? Death is very uninteresting and useless, and most importantly, offers almost no possibility of being reversed.
- docker_up 7y agoThis literally sounds like Futurama, having heads in jars.
- maxaf 7y agoThis is quite timely, as I'm just about to finish Neal Stephenson's new novel: Fall, or Dodge In Hell. https://n.pr/30EFA4l https://n.pr/30EFA4l That story revolves around scanning the brains of deceased humans into a computer simulation. Initially this technology is only available as a "get out of jail" card for rich people, as the scanning process and subsequent ops costs of running the simulation are, well, astronomical. Eventually the process is dumbed down to the level of a certain kind of "life insurance", and many more dead people join the simulation. That's when the floodgates open for real. I know I run the risk of spoiling the story, but I'll just say that this is one way the singularity can get started.
- petemcc 7y agoCame here to say this. Almost finished myself and have loved the read so far. I have also enjoyed this unintentional easter egg - the musical artist mentioned early in the novel doesn't exist IRL, but a keen early reader has created a Spotify playlist by that name, and it's been growing steadily the past few weeks as people search to see if she is real and happen upon this. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/41rZjyFBpUFpKZdGZHbbXl?si=9c7zqj-BSXKl5dpY6vgvbA https://open.spotify.com/playlist/41rZjyFBpUFpKZdGZHbbXl?si=...
- Zircom 7y ago>How would it work. Do you get to 90 years old and they pull out your brain and put it into a newer body? I don't recall the title but in middle school I remember reading a scifi/horrorish thriller about this exact scenario, the problem they ran into is that the brain still ages, and transplanting it into a younger body doesn't magically de-age the brain itself.
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- ChuckMcM 7y agoAll good questions, but it also lends some credence to the cryopreservative folks who are freezing people's heads for later reanimation. What those guys need is a recipe that they can use to insure the preserved brain can be re-animated later. For them a good perfusion process and a perfusion fluid that maximally preserves brain tissue over time would be a solid advancement in their cause.
- gwern 7y agoGiven the amount of brain damage that will happen even with good methods, you'd probably be better off using the perfusion to instead perfuse cryoprotectives and vitrify your brain to stop all additional degradation indefinitely (or instead of cryonics, use plastination to fixate the brain), and wait for a permanent solution.
- AstralStorm 7y agoSaid permanent solution will likely require some volunteers though after all on the way to perfecting it. So it would likely be used on critical patients who have signed an extended organ donation pledge. Maybe. Likely some will object to any, even voluntary, form of experimentation with anyone's brain. By the way, maintaining even a brain in cryostasis is expensive compared to such experiments.
- gwern 7y ago> By the way, maintaining even a brain in cryostasis is expensive compared to such experiments. Not really. You can maintain a brain in an LN2 tank for like $100 a year: LN2 is one of the cheapest fluids around. Very very few biology experiments come anywhere close to costs like that.
- etrautmann 7y agoIf you're interested in these types of questions - Neal Stephenson's new book Fall deals with many of these.
- e40 7y agoIf this fascinates you, then you'll like Altered Carbon, Broken Angels, and Woken Furies by Richard K. Morgan. Changing bodies is commonplace for the rich in these novels. They are quite excellent, if not a tad violent, so don't read them if that's not your thing. The novels are way better than the Netflix S01, which was the first book. I'm guessing there will be 2 more seasons, one for each book.