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To be honest, if my only other option was to be buried, I would love to let my brain be connected to some machine that try to keep it as alive-like as possible.
by acdbddh 5mo ago
To be honest, if my only other option was to be buried, I would love to let my brain be connected to some machine that try to keep it as alive-like as possible.
Just please don't remove my brain before I'm 1000% certainly dead.
- saalweachter 5mo agoTo some extent, volunteering for any sort of medical study is signing up to be tortured in the hopes that someone down the line might be saved by the research. Most cancer treatments, for instance, are objectively terrible to go through, and when you're testing and developing the protocols you're pumping already sick people full of poisons and hoping for the best. There's some fraction of people who would prefer to be kept alive as a brain in a jar, depending on the alternatives, but getting to that point is going to require a bunch of people to volunteer to undergo excruciating torture as we learn how to keep the brain alive, how to keep them comfortable, how to keep them conscious, sane and let them interact with the world.
- bsimpson 5mo agoThis is precisely why I've never been interested in being an organ donor. I don't remember where specifically I learned this, but I was taught that tissue has to be alive to be useful, so they harvest it when you're almost-dead. Having my last moments be being literally dismembered is not something I wish for my future self.
- scratchyone 5mo agoThey will never remove tissue if you're still alive. This is the reason organ donation is most common in brain-death cases, because the tissue is still alive but you are entirely dead. As you point out, it would be horrible to dismember someone who is still alive and would certainly violate their oath. I hope this is a comforting answer, I choose to be an organ donor because of these details.
- FrinkleFrankle 5mo agoTrue. You'd probably go crazy as a brain disconnected from your body, regardless of what drugs they give you.. But It'd be an interesting final experience, I guess. I do hope they're getting pain killers along with the anaesthesia, though.
- acdbddh 4mo agoI guess they would plug us some electrodes which we could learn to use to communicate. ;) The brain itself doesn't have pain receptors, so painkillers would not make any difference. The only pain would be existentional ;)
- JacobKfromIRC 5mo agoAnother option is cryonics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics It's not the same as what you suggest, but there's still hope you could regain consciousness, and this is a process that some companies already have infrastructure for. It is pretty expensive though.
- acdbddh 4mo agothis actually started to look promising recently, since https://eon.systems/ https://eon.systems/ somewhat managed to scan and upload fly brain to the computer, maybe one day the same would be possible with the frozen human brain. imagine waking up in the simulated environment...