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Pig brains partially revived four hours after death

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Pig brains partially revived four hours after death

#71

Post by fmihaila »

saulrh wrote: post #64
nabla9 wrote: post #23

Imagine donating your body to science and then waking up in a lab as a brain in a vat. "A Living Soul" by P. C. Jersild is amazing sci-fi book exploring this. https://www.amazon.com/Living-Norvik-Press-English-Swedish/d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._C._Jersild

It'd actually be fantastic. If I've donated my brain to anything like the modern research apparatus, I can be relatively sure of one of two possibilities: Either my brain was chosen as a test, in which case the project is on the news literally worldwide and the ethics have had the crap argued out of them and I can be sure that any limitations of the environment are due to technological shortcomings and I get to parti…

> It'd actually be fantastic [...] Either my brain was chosen as a test, [...] or I'm part of a follow-up trial or large-scale roll-out

Or your enemies took power, and when they were going through the vats for payback they picked yours (along with many others). If you think you have no enemies, or that you know them all personally, you are better than me.

Re: Pig brains partially revived four hours after death

#72

Post by Wowfunhappy »

mkagenius wrote: post #47
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #13

Throwing it out there—when I'm dead, you are totally allowed to resuscitate my brain. Better than being dead. Please make sure I am supplied with some good books to read, if at all possible.

How would we know if you wanted to change your decision after you are dead?

How would you know if I didn't change my decision? Why is being dead the default choice?

The best course of action is to rely on what was previously requested.

Re: Pig brains partially revived four hours after death

#73

Post by tannerc »

Cybiote wrote: post #56
tannerc wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All response experience exists within the brain, yes, but it is only ever made possible through external stimulus. The brain itself doesn't feel anything, but generates those feelings as a response to events outside of itself. "If it seems strange that nerve signals coming from the back can represent vision, bear in mind that your own sense of vision is carried by nothing but millions of nerve signals that just happe…

Phantom limbs can cause/have pain, partly from the lack of expected predicted feedback. I cannot begin to imagine what sort of chaos, in the dynamical sense, a non-existent body would cause and how that would be represented in the parts of the brain that calculates how to interpret it.

Good point!

Re: Pig brains partially revived four hours after death

#74

Post by jerf »

veryworried wrote: post #8
matchbok wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pain exists in the brain, not the body.

No matter how hard I think, I cannot seem to manifest any true pain in my mind. I doubt a pig could either.

I've been hurt in dreams, in ways that do not appear to have been the real world poking through. It's never been great pain, but it's been real pain or something very close to it. There's also phantom limb syndrome [1]. It's not hard to imagine whatever mechanism is in play there could run even more unfettered when there is no feedback from the body at all.

We do not know that simply being severed from your body is simply experiencing no sensory input of any kind, and actually have a lot of reasons to expect that would not be the subjective experience for very long.

(Bizarrely, the dream pain has nothing to do with anything in real life that should have been pain. Apparently my subconscious is fine with dismemberment or stabbing or whatever, but what really bothers it is removing my orthodontic spacer from the roof of my mouth, which apparently it feels is me trying to remove the roof of my mouth. Subconsciouses are weird.)

[1]: https://www.britannica.com/science/phantom-limb-syndrome

Re: Pig brains partially revived four hours after death

#75

Post by [deleted] »

saulrh wrote: post #64
nabla9 wrote: post #23

Imagine donating your body to science and then waking up in a lab as a brain in a vat. "A Living Soul" by P. C. Jersild is amazing sci-fi book exploring this. https://www.amazon.com/Living-Norvik-Press-English-Swedish/d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._C._Jersild

It'd actually be fantastic. If I've donated my brain to anything like the modern research apparatus, I can be relatively sure of one of two possibilities: Either my brain was chosen as a test, in which case the project is on the news literally worldwide and the ethics have had the crap argued out of them and I can be sure that any limitations of the environment are due to technological shortcomings and I get to parti…

[deleted]

Re: Pig brains partially revived four hours after death

#76

Post by saulrh »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #13

Throwing it out there—when I'm dead, you are totally allowed to resuscitate my brain. Better than being dead. Please make sure I am supplied with some good books to read, if at all possible.

Strongly agreed.

The "what if they wake me up to torture me" scenarios seem like wild catastrophizing to me - if someone has the political power and resources to develop special brain-torture gear, rez me, and keep me alive so they can torture me, they have the political power and resources to kidnap me and torture me with knives and fire as long as they want. It'd probably even be easier for them to do it to my physical body, right here and right now.

It sounds like the real worry is "what if I wake up in a dystopian future". And, of course, once you look at that, the expected value calculation is trivial. Consider the set of futures which have sufficiently-developed research and economy to systematize the operation of and systematically execute on rezzing random frozen brains. Consider the set of futures which have that property but are also dystopian enough to rez brains for the sole purpose of torturing them. Recall that these things are in tension; the kinds of irrationalities that lead a civilization to do that kind of thing will impair them in other ways, sometimes significantly - enmity from less-extreme polities, toxic culture leading to structural inefficiency, etc. You have to reach really far to find that region of the configuration space of possible future worlds.

So look at the expected values. Yes, being tortured for a while would suck. But being alive again, and possibly even biologically immortal, has the expected value of an entire new life. And the probabilities say that being rezzed is far more likely in a good future than a bad future. Literally every stage of the expected-value calculation says that being rezzed can be expected to be a win.

Re: Pig brains partially revived four hours after death

#77

Post by nabla9 »

saulrh wrote: post #64
nabla9 wrote: post #23

Imagine donating your body to science and then waking up in a lab as a brain in a vat. "A Living Soul" by P. C. Jersild is amazing sci-fi book exploring this. https://www.amazon.com/Living-Norvik-Press-English-Swedish/d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._C._Jersild

It'd actually be fantastic. If I've donated my brain to anything like the modern research apparatus, I can be relatively sure of one of two possibilities: Either my brain was chosen as a test, in which case the project is on the news literally worldwide and the ethics have had the crap argued out of them and I can be sure that any limitations of the environment are due to technological shortcomings and I get to parti…

Your brain is one of the first 543 experiments in a private laboratory. Researchers convinced ethical board that brains were not really alive. Brains were kept alive average 3 years, but no "contact" was officially attempted to avoid legal or ethical issues. There are rumors of some extracurricular activity happening.

Your contribution is not wasted however. First brain that was able to talk to the world and received full human rights was Peter Thiel's brain.

Re: Pig brains partially revived four hours after death

#78

Post by tlrobinson »

saulrh wrote: post #64
nabla9 wrote: post #23

Imagine donating your body to science and then waking up in a lab as a brain in a vat. "A Living Soul" by P. C. Jersild is amazing sci-fi book exploring this. https://www.amazon.com/Living-Norvik-Press-English-Swedish/d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._C._Jersild

It'd actually be fantastic. If I've donated my brain to anything like the modern research apparatus, I can be relatively sure of one of two possibilities: Either my brain was chosen as a test, in which case the project is on the news literally worldwide and the ethics have had the crap argued out of them and I can be sure that any limitations of the environment are due to technological shortcomings and I get to parti…

> I get to participate in fixing it

You'd be ok with effectively being blind, deaf, mute, paralyzed, and probably brain damaged, in the name of science?

Re: Pig brains partially revived four hours after death

#79

Post by sfkdjf9j3j »

fmihaila wrote: post #71
saulrh wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd actually be fantastic. If I've donated my brain to anything like the modern research apparatus, I can be relatively sure of one of two possibilities: Either my brain was chosen as a test, in which case the project is on the news literally worldwide and the ethics have had the crap argued out of them and I can be sure that any limitations of the environment are due to technological shortcomings and I get to parti…

> It'd actually be fantastic [...] Either my brain was chosen as a test, [...] or I'm part of a follow-up trial or large-scale roll-out Or your enemies took power, and when they were going through the vats for payback they picked yours (along with many others). If you think you have no enemies, or that you know them all personally, you are better than me.

Is it really that weird to not have "enemies"? There I people I wouldn't hang out with or wouldn't work with again, but I don't think I'd consider them enemies.

Re: Pig brains partially revived four hours after death

#80

Post by xfitm3 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #13

Throwing it out there—when I'm dead, you are totally allowed to resuscitate my brain. Better than being dead. Please make sure I am supplied with some good books to read, if at all possible.

I can't relate to this at all. When I'm dead, I'd like to cease. I have no desire for my brain to outlast my body.
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