Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body? • Hacker News Board

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#101

Post by ImprobableTruth » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 12:36 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #46

Larrikin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always imagine this will be the divide between rich and poor in the future. The more expensive technology will break the person down and send their atoms to the destination to be reconstructed, it will be slower but it will be the same person. The less expensive technology will scan the person send that data and they will be printed out from a a futuristic atomic printer in a process that kills the original. I imag…

You are presupposing that there is a material difference between these two. Whenever you have a discontinuation of your conscious experience (for example, when you go to sleep and wake up), you can view that as one person disappearing, and a copy waking up in the morning. In fact, unless you believe in a transcendent soul as the seat of consciousness, it must be equivalent. So, when you step into the teleporter, you…

> Whenever you have a discontinuation of your conscious experience (for example, when you go to sleep and wake up), you can view that as one person disappearing, and a copy waking up in the morning. In fact, unless you believe in a transcendent soul as the seat of consciousness, it must be equivalent.

Only if our conscious experience truly stops during sleep (which as far as I know isn't actually backed up - there's a world of difference between minimally consciousness and stopped consciousness. From my understanding we simply don't know enough about consciousness) and if you believe whatever makes up experience isn't baked into the physical i.e. panpsychism, unless you want to classify that as a 'soul' (but then I'd reject your characterization of a soul as some magical thing that influences personality).

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#102

Post by mcv » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 12:39 PM UTC

keiferski wrote: post #52

The fact that this is uncontroversial to a lot of people mostly just shows how intellect-focused our society has become. Plenty of other value systems treat the Self as the entire body, not merely the head. Perhaps if we did too, we might not have so many issues with obesity and drug abuse. Dualism has consequences. I once read someone describe academics as “floating heads with bodies attached.” I think that could ap…

It doesn't just raise questions about the self, but also lots of legal questions. Imagine you would transplant a brain in a different body. Who is that person now legally? Technically, only a single organ got transplanted, and everything else is still the body donor. But of course the person has the memories and presumably the sense of self of the brain donor. But the finger prints, iris scan and DNA of the body donor.

Of course we don't even know whether this sense of self is really purely attached to the brain. That brain is still connected to the rest of your body, and who knows what the body chemistry of the body donor will do to the new brain? Maybe we'll end up with a completely new person. Maybe not all memories will survive the transplant, but even if they do, you'll have a person who has the memories of the brain donor, but will be recognised by everybody as the body donor.

Mind you, if you transplant the entire head and not just the brain, this issue will lean a lot more strongly towards the head donor.

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#103

Post by keiferski » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 12:42 PM UTC

mcv wrote: post #102

keiferski wrote: post #52

The fact that this is uncontroversial to a lot of people mostly just shows how intellect-focused our society has become. Plenty of other value systems treat the Self as the entire body, not merely the head. Perhaps if we did too, we might not have so many issues with obesity and drug abuse. Dualism has consequences. I once read someone describe academics as “floating heads with bodies attached.” I think that could ap…

It doesn't just raise questions about the self, but also lots of legal questions. Imagine you would transplant a brain in a different body. Who is that person now legally? Technically, only a single organ got transplanted, and everything else is still the body donor. But of course the person has the memories and presumably the sense of self of the brain donor. But the finger prints, iris scan and DNA of the body dono…

Yep. Our whole legal system is built on the idea of one mind implanted in one body from birth. Things quickly start getting complicated when that breaks down.

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#104

Post by keiferski » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 12:45 PM UTC

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #96

keiferski wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I linked to an article about embodied cognition. It’s a serious topic studied by scientists and philosophers.

Have you read your article? Embodied cognition comes in different forms. The 'basic' idea is simply that the body plays some role in cognition. The view that's closest to traditional cognition - and generally regarded as uncontroversial - is that the body has a strong influence on the mind. A lot of (most?) computationalists would accept this idea with no issue. It's the idea that our mind is actually distributed, th…

I’m not really committed to a particular model, I just think the body clearly plays an important, if not critical role - and that this is not what most people in the comments here agree with.

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#105

Post by fishtacos » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 12:56 PM UTC

mozey wrote: post #78

Engineering-MD wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also apply the same argument Pre and post deep sleep or anaesthetic

Oh wow, never thought of that before. Now I'm feeling a little creeped out. Kind of makes me think of the difference between disk and RAM when rebooting a computer

There is a sci-fi/horror game called SOMA that explores a related theme. It has an "easy" mode that makes it almost a walking simulator, so even if one is not a gamer, they'd probably enjoy it. Highly recommended.

https://somagame.com/

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#106

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 1:01 PM UTC

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #93

Nextgrid wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That doesn’t make it actually the case To the best of our knowledge and experience with it comes to transplanting organs, it seems to be? > doing so has a lot of negative consequences for our actual embodied selves Can you elaborate? Organ transplants (and most likely other medical procedures) definitely throw wrenches into various spiritual & religious beliefs, but in the physical world (which we can observe & stu…

You have a bunch of nerve tissue around your body, which contain information. Your brain is also calibrated to your organs. Your brain may notice you need to release X amount of adrenaline, and sends out a signal. Then your new body releases a different amount, because your new adrenal glands are used to a slightly different signal intensity. And the body contains an enormous amount of complicated metabolical process…

[deleted]

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#107

Post by dade_ » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 1:04 PM UTC

I think the patient would spend the rest of their life in physical rehabilitation. They would have to train their brain to remap every muscle movement. Coordination would be a nightmare and a major fall risk (very common way to die in a hospital). Then there is the whole digestive system, it is hard to believe it runs completely independently, and if that isn’t working right, it would be a horrible death.

As fascinating as these ideas are, hopefully repairing a severed spinal cord will be a reality soon: https://news.yale.edu/2021/02/22/yale-scientists-repair-inju...

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#108

Post by strogonoff » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 1:05 PM UTC

ImprobableTruth wrote: post #86

keiferski wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s definitely a complex topic and not one that can be hashed out in a HN comment. My thought is something like this: because we treat our “real selves” as just our heads/minds, we unintentionally or intentionally disregard the rest of our body. To me, this seems to be related to some specific negative things like obesity, for example. Many people don’t treat their body with the same level of respect as they…

>It is also probably just conceptually wrong to think that our bodies are just a side accessory, especially when it comes to understanding how much of our actual intelligence comes from being embodied. There's not a single study to show this, so calling it 'probably wrong' is just disingenuous. All the current results simply say 'sensory data impacts our cognition', which people who think that the brain encompasses t…

> The real test would be whether 'faking' body parts by sending mock sensory data would lead to the same result as having the real body part.

How about a test that fakes that body part which receives sensory data and triggers a response? Perhaps it can lead to the same results as having a real brain! /s

(Sorry, couldn't resist!)

On a serious note, articles about how for example the gut affects our mental state (all the way to links with autism) were posted to HN many times.

Calling the idea that our bodies are like side accessories attached to our brains “probably wrong” may be an overreach, but personally I suspect the stage at which it becomes a viable idea would also be one where we are able to just copy an entire human brain. (Which might just turn out not to be a meaningful proposition, but I guess we’ll see!)

And as long as we aren’t there/don’t know for sure, I’d put forward that the mere possibility of a “body replacement” actually destroying personality to an unknown extent is enough of a reason to never deploy it in foreseeable future except as last resort.

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#109

Post by TaupeRanger » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 1:07 PM UTC

esperent wrote: post #47

cute_boi wrote: post #24

Is there such thing called transplanting a body? I thought it would be transplanting a brain because brain is part where memories etc live? Yea there are some philosophical queries but you know ...

> brain is part where memories etc live? As far as we know. But we really know so little and there's a lot of interesting work being done regarding the networks of nerves in other parts of the body. It's extremely likely that the brain is where most of the memories are stored, things like your name and age and so on. It could turn out that a lot of other types of memory, like muscle memory or emotional memory, are mo…

> It could turn out that a lot of other types of memory, like muscle memory or emotional memory, are more distributed

They aren't. We've removed almost every body part/organ we can and it doesn't seem to have any effect on your emotional memory. Muscle memory actually involves the nerves of the muscles, we already know that, but it's not the kind of conscious memory the rest of the comment refers to.

Re: Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?

#110

Post by johndoe42377 » Sun, Mar 07, 2021, 1:07 PM UTC

What kind of question is this?

There is zero voluntary supply of healthy bodies, even for the half of Bezos money.

And there is no black market because society will reject Bezos, let's say hypothetically, one day showing off in a new body below his head.

Kidnapping, murder and operation are cheap.