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A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

singularityhub.com

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Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#131

Post by ctvo »

This article is so badly written I had to stop half way through. The random double quotes makes it look like a high school student took over the WordPress installation.

> This week, a group from the New York University School of Medicine said “no thank you” to medication altogether.

> Once it detects an electrical signal that suggests “pain found,” it sends the information to the “sleeper agent,” a computer chip implanted in the front part of the brain.

> Yeah, it’s pretty wild.

> But it’s a “blueprint” for tuning the brain to ease pain in the future, the authors wrote.

Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#132

Post by JohnHaugeland »

This is called a "droud" or a "tasp," and it is a terrible idea. It's the perfect drug, and you'll lose all the things pain is there for, like protecting you from harm.

Wireheads are aka Krokodil users.

I'm not anti-drug, but some mechanisms are outside the human's capacity for self control, and pain remediation is one of those.

Put it under someone else's control and you just put that person under someone else's control.

Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#133

Post by JohnHaugeland »

after_care wrote: post #64
hirundo wrote: post #37

If this technique can relieve pain it can likely also cause it, and also cause pleasure. So it has the potential to become a technology for human puppetry. Or for self abuse, as in Larry Niven's wireheads. It isn't hard to imagine various modern regimes willing to implant control devices into prisoners, criminal or political.

We can already cause pain or pleasure easily. This isn’t anything new. Think about how long the history of torture is.

So your suggestion to make this seem safer is to say "it's like torture so we already have it?"

Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#134

Post by JohnHaugeland »

Caylio wrote: post #89
TheCoelacanth wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this supposed to be a joke? The vaccines had extensive human and animal testing.

"extensive"

More than almost any other vaccine in history, despite the scare media from universally politically aligned fringe sources

Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#135

Post by atatatat »

goldenkey wrote: post #100
BizarroLand wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a few instances where pain management becomes the overall deciding factor in peoples' day to day life. "I can't go to work and feed my family because everything hurts so bad" can become a common statement for these people. In addition, addiction to painkillers, spending a huge percentage of your income at compounding pharmacies, and turning to illegal and possibly dangerous drugs to save a buck or to fill t…

As a chronic pain sufferer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitragyna_speciosa basically saved my life. The DEA tried to ban it a few years ago but too many cancer patients testified before Congress how well it worked compared to the prescription opioids. The DEA was forced to bow out. The cool thing about Mitragyna speciosa is that it's a tree, a pretty hardy one. In my experience, the older trees have more potent lea…

I'd like to hear as much as you'll talk about this.

Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#136

Post by buu700 »

m0llusk wrote: post #125

This sounds like a really bad idea. Controlling pain, maybe, but even than raises issues of what exactly is pain and what is control. What people are not seeing here is that pain is a generalized concept in the brain. The pain of loss, the pain of remembering, and so on are also pain and without that pain we are at risk of losing our humility and humanity. I have some personal experience with this in an ex-friend who…

who takes a lot of pain killers and has done a lot of terrible things to me and others apparently in part because he feels no pain over anything he does and hence no guilt

Out of curiosity, what is this conclusion based on? Going off of only what you've said here, insofar as there is a relationship between the painkillers and his antisocial behavior, I would be more inclined to believe any of the following before the idea that a lack of pain somehow directly harmed his morality:

* The condition at the root of his pain also has negative neurological/mental effects

* The fact that he suffers from serious chronic pain (as opposed a lack thereof) impairs his mental state

* Side effects of the painkillers (as opposed to pain relief in and of itself) contribute to his ailing physiological/neurological/mental health

Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#137

Post by hattmall »

atatatat wrote: post #135
goldenkey wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a chronic pain sufferer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitragyna_speciosa basically saved my life. The DEA tried to ban it a few years ago but too many cancer patients testified before Congress how well it worked compared to the prescription opioids. The DEA was forced to bow out. The cool thing about Mitragyna speciosa is that it's a tree, a pretty hardy one. In my experience, the older trees have more potent lea…

I'd like to hear as much as you'll talk about this.

It's just Kratom. It's basically a low level heroin. It's addictive and not really a walk in the park and detoxing from it is very bad. Google Kratom Withdrawal.

It also fucks your kidneys, in a pretty short time of chronic use.

Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#138

Post by imwillofficial »

educaysean wrote: post #101
imwillofficial wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leave it to modern man to think we can rearchitect something so fundamental as pain and pleasure in the human experience without disastrous results.

Let's think about the internet. Let's think about how it enables us to achieve instant communication all around the globe and freely share and distribute knowledge too great to hold in one's brain. I'd say the modern men are more than capable of overcoming biological barriers once thought to be fundamentally impossible to achieve. It might be a fairly rough road to get there, but I'm certain our understanding of how…

At what cost? What are the second order effects of the glorious revolution?

Re: A new brain implant automatically detects and kills pain in real time

#140

Post by adtac »

411111111111111 wrote: post #67
codeulike wrote: post #52

... in mice https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice

Did you expect them to start testing it on humans before mice?

It sounds very obvious, but there are some macroscopic medical phenomena that apply only to mice and small rodents. For example, I recently learnt that you can freeze hamsters and then "thaw" them in a microwave and they'll just wake and continue to live normally; this doesn't seem to work with humans unfortunately. Just imagine the applications, you wouldn't even need a regional hospitals; just freeze everyone and send them to a centralised mega hospital and ship them back when healed.

(As an aside, this was one of the first ever uses of a microwave.)

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