141–150 of 207 posts
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
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…
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Couldn't they monitor brain activity for common pain modalities?
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.
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Not really. We know that oxygen-starved brain quickly destroys itself in minutes, unless very cold. So even if you can revive a brain after hours, it will not be a very good brain.
Why would anyone wait a few hours after death to do the technique? Wouldn't it make more sense to do it right away, and get the brain into its new medium? Right now there's all the limitations of something that's a nascent technology, but the methods should surely be improved as time goes on.
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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.
Will you know you're dead though? If they have the technology to bring your brain back, they probably have the technology to make your brain think you're still in your body and you woke up.
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There won't be any pain as brains don't have nerve endings. But you won't have any other senses too. Just pitch blank, deathly silence, floating for eternity.
"floating", "silence", and "black" are sensory states. There's no assurance that a brain in a pool would feel any of these. It's hard to know what a brain will project as it attempts to construct a reality matching that for which it evolved.
Also, people who become blind later in life often describe it as "black", so I think it's reasonable to assume that's how the brain would interpret lack of sense.
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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.
I'm interested in reading more, do you have a source?
Here is a past discussion of a BBC article related to the subject, about 2.5 years old.
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Why would anyone wait a few hours after death to do the technique? Wouldn't it make more sense to do it right away, and get the brain into its new medium? Right now there's all the limitations of something that's a nascent technology, but the methods should surely be improved as time goes on.
Cause it takes time to get to the hospital that does the procedure and it takes time to start the procedure.
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
“We are all aware that the senses can be deceived, the eyes fooled. But how can we be sure our senses are not being deceived at any particular time, or even all the time? Might I just be a brain in a tank somewhere, tricked all my life into believing in the events of this world by some insane computer? And does my life gain or lose meaning based on my reaction to such solipsism?” - Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7…