Live dissection and experimentation on “alive but drugged” human brains is mental. How do you ensure that you aren’t torturing a brain that can’t see, hear or scream? How are you held accountable?
Well, we know how to make living brains insensate - that's who we all make it through surgery.
Presumably they're doing something similar - or using some other well-understood mechanism - to ensure that's not the case.
> The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures. Bexorg obtains brains in partnership with organizations that procure donated organs for transplantation, and Vrselja says once families understand the company’s process and goals, their response is overwhelmingly positive.
We know anesthesia "works," and we know some of its molecular targets, but we do not fully know the mechanism by which it produces unconsciousness, ie whether anesthesia eliminates experience, or mainly blocks memory, report, and integrated neural processing.
Anesthesia appears to be a fairly broad effect - anaesthetics work on plants, for example [1], even though they lack any neural tissue whatsoever. It would be extremely surprising if those effects were also targeted enough to halt only some types of brain activity.
My understanding was that we now believe that patients under anesthesia are often "awake" but the drugs prevent them from forming memories so they can't complain once the anesthesia wears off.
More like very rarely (1-2 per 1000), very partially aware. I could not find anything saying that it was common, and it appears cases of actual awareness to the point of having pain / trauma are far rarer still. People who have this tend to have foggy memories or other concrete PTSD symptoms after the fact. It does not appear to be the norm.
I still think this experimentation is absolutely insane and I strongly object because there is no way to get feedback from the "patient" after the fact. Since we have no real idea of what is happening, I believe we should err on the side of caution. "But they could consent beforehand" is not morally acceptable for intrinsically inhumane actions that take away fundamental human rights and dignity. So if you think this is possibly inhumane / potentially torture, it is an irrelevant point since true consent would be impossible.
That's how twilight anesthesia works. That's the kind you get when having something like wisdom tooth removal or an endoscopy. They want you to be responsive to instructions but completely relaxed and unable to form memories of the event.
"Anesthesia" is a wider umbrella term than most people realize with many levels of sedation.
Under "general anesthesia", the patient is completely unconscious. They don't respond to any stimuli. In rare cases, some patients may have an adverse reaction and still retain some sensation, but that's very uncommon. My understanding is that we are certain that patients are actually unconscious (and not just unable to respond) because none of the other involuntary responses to trauma occur during surgery: elevated heart rate, etc. In short, you are simply not there for a while. This is what you get for most kinds of significant surgeries unless the surgery requires you to be awake (like brain surgery where they may need to ask you questions).
"Sedation" or "twilight sedation" is a lower level of anesthesia. You are somewhat conscious and can respond to commands from the doctor. But you are unable to form memories of what's happening and you're usually on something like fentanyl that makes you entirely OK with whatever it is they are doing to you. This is common for procedures like colonoscopies and endoscopies where the procedure is somewhat uncomfortable but where you aren't being cut open.
In general, anesthesiologists are trying to balance the goal of patient comfort against the risks of deeper levels of sedation.
> The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures.
Honestly, there is so much terrible terrible terrible stuff going on in the world and happening to real people, I think it is safe to say that those brains are having a blast. Relatively speaking.
It just invokes a strong emotional response because it's so "abnormal", but if you think about it, there is so much more pain going on where no one bats an eye.
Perfectly avoidable pain even. So it's not even that aspect.
___
OTOH, this is HN, I guess.
Having empathy for real people would be harmful to the business model of most people's employers.
So instead, mostly performative outrage/empathy with something that is effectively dead can fill in that gap.
I recognized that anesthetic from its famous irresponsible use-
"Attention to the risks of off-label use of propofol increased in August 2009, after the release of the Los Angeles County coroner's report that musician Michael Jackson was killed by a mixture of propofol and the benzodiazepine drugs lorazepam, midazolam, and diazepam on 25 June 2009." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propofol
Used properly, however:
"To induce general anesthesia, propofol is the drug used almost exclusively, having largely replaced sodium thiopental."
The media and the people who bought into their shameless attention-grabbing lies are the reason he had sleep problems. He was unanimously acquitted of all counts, but the media made his life into a living hell by consistently portraying him as a pedophile because it drove incredible engagement numbers. A justice system should be "innocent until proven guilty", and yet MJ was deemed guilty even after proven innocent. Longform read from an actually good journalist, if you care to learn for yourself: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-of-the-most-shameful_b_61...
I mean, he may have never done a sexual thing but his pedophilia was quite obvious and the degeneracy of parents to allow their children to spend the night in the bed of a grown man is not really good for society.
because he paid families to sleep in beds and hang out with their children, this is not a normal adult man behavior, and defending it on the internet is weird.
There is a wide, wide range between "normal behaviour" and "sex offender". I'm fine with being weird, and have no qualms defending the right of other people to be weird.
Maybe he liked playing with children because adults are evil and only saw him as a moneybag to try to extricate a payday from. If he wasn't harming them, it's not my business.
It is not normal adult behavior and he likely should have had therapy.
But it is not necessarily pedophilia. Because that means wanting to have sex with children.
The explanation I heard is he wanted to be close to children to compensate for his own lack of innocent childhood. Children don't do sexual intercourse. Now if he was a child in his mind, then I as a parent would surely not have gave my children to his care, but this is still something very different from child molesting.
And you know this because of your firsthand experience observing it... or because the media told you so? Considering how readily the media is willing to lie for engagement, the truth is more likely to be the opposite of what they report.
It's not only not been proven, but the island man stuff and testimony of people like Culkin suggest he actually did the opposite of doing bad things to children and was most likely a scapegoat for the "elites" of Hollywood because of his race.
At the very least drop an "allegedly" or something to make it sound a little tasteful.
I think there is worlds between definitely defining what consciousness is, and what are some of the scenarios and conditions under which consciousness cannot ever happen.
And on top of that, they put a sedative, just in case.
The word "alive" is doing a lot of work here. A brain is pretty much permanently fried after five to fifteen minutes without oxygen, and these are donor brains, not some emergency brain extraction team, so the timeframe will be much longer than that. There might be 'life' left in there in the technical sense, but there's no 'person' left.
It's not a great article, and it glosses over the reality that if you hooked this brain up to an EEG it would show unequivocal brain death. CELLS of the brain are alive, but in terms of being able to function in any sort of coordinated way there that ship sailed minutes after the person who donated their organs died. The wave of depolarization that marks brain death isn't something we can reverse, and what's being done here is all about metabolism and structure rather than those much more subtle functions.
IMO the more questionable aspect of this entire operation is the use of "AI" to reach conclusions about how the test molecules are being metabolized, but that's a lot less compelling than implying that some company is somehow preserving life in a disembodied brain.
Brain does not have physical feelings, and with all other feelings cut off and not possible, even with consciousness it won’t be a horror scenario like in MetallicA’s “One”.
It's still an open debate whether the seat of consciousness (or even simpler, perception) is the brain.
see e.g. Wahbeh, H., Radin, D., Cannard, C., & Delorme, A. (2022). What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain? Observational and empirical challenges to materialistic models. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 955594. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.955594
Same for memory, which is "needed" as well for your question to make sense. The more current theories assume memories are stored not only in the brain, but throughout the body.
see e.g. Repetto, C., & Riva, G. (2023). The neuroscience of body memory: Recent findings and conceptual advances. EXCLI journal, 22, 191–206. https://doi.org/10.17179/excli2023-5877
I believe to some extent that everything is conscious and that it's specifically our species' prized mental features that lessen it's level at least temporarily. purely esoterically the statement "a rock is more conscious than a human being" doesn't even seem too outrageous to me.
Ok, I only skimmed the paper but it seems like all of the "non-local phenomena" in support of their theory are basically psychic powers. Not exactly strong evidence.
You're free to stop there. We can also turn it around, and I can ask you for any paper that details the theory of why the brain should be the location of consciousness.
I only gave one example and Wikipedia to start with. There's a lot of material out there if you're (rightfully) skeptical of that one paper. I don't even know what you're refering to as "their theory", as the way I read it, they're basically documenting various co-existing theories, and the authors don't disclose which one they find the most likely. I also don't see it as necessary for science to pick one; it's all about theories. I prefer documentation of all possible theories, and see no reason to dismiss one over the other unless they're disproven. I pointed to that paper, because any paper that talks about alternative theories shows the point I was making: We don't know yet. The point was not to claim that they've managed to put together good or bad arguments.
Sure. We can't even agree on a good definition for "consciousness", we certainly don't know _how_ it works. I don't think there's a lot of debate around that specific point.
I'll try and read the paper more carefully after work, but my quick read was: they posit that consciousness might not be localized in the brain because if it were, then how would people be able to perform telepathy / remote viewing / future foresight? I can't assert that their non-local hypothesis is wrong, but I can pretty confidently say that the evidence they're using to back it up is unscientific BS.
When I had my ear surgery about 20 years ago, the doctor explained to me that I would be awake for part of the procedure, but the anesthesia meant that I would have no memory of it.¹ It’s a weird thing to think about whether that lack of memory would obviate the pain or discomfort of the moment.
⸻
1. As it turned out, I was so frightened in the lead-up to the surgery that they had to do general anesthesia on me because I was shaking too much for them to operate so I was unconscious for the whole thing.
Purely anecdotal, but I had surgery a few years ago (relatively minor). But I could feel for months after a sort of 'unconscious PSTD' I don't know how else to describe it. Even after it was healed and the pain was gone, there was just a deep sense of 'something bad happened in there' feeling. I'd have dreams of someone digging around in my body. Anyway, it's all gone now, but a weird experience for sure.
I had the same thoughts "but won't i feel it THEN?" when I was getting an upper endoscopy. The anesthesiologist said you're in such a trance, dreamlike state plus with the inability to form memories its like you're not your real "consciousness" but something different. Sort of like your brain is in "limp mode" and its not really _you._ This was both comforting and slightly terrifying in a different way.
“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
Activity recorded M.Y. 2302.22467
(TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED)
Meditations on First Philosophy messed me up bad. All of Descartes’ reasoning about the inability to determine whether experience was real made complete sense to me. But when I got to where he started to try to build back reality, I didn’t buy it. I can only believe in reality by willfully forgetting Descartes.
This makes me feel physically ill. It's like something straight out of a sci-fi dystopia, how did this get approved? Who determined that reinjecting biological activity into a human brain is definitely not some form of reanimation? If they're using heavy sedation to prevent electrical activity, is that not tacit admission they're not 100% sure that consciousness might return otherwise? How did this pass ethics review, or did they even bother?
Dude we can't revive brains minutes after cardiac arrest, when they're inside their bodies, even when we're TRYING TO DO SO. You can think about "what if" if you like the though experiment, but seriously arguing that there's any way that brains could recover consciousness the next day because you gave them nutrients is like arguing that voyager could crash back on earth and injure someone after being flung backwards around a loose interstellar body.
I just finished reading "That Hideous Strength" (CS Lewis) this weekend where they have a disembodied head kept "alive", and some convicts in the pipeline whose heads/brains, it is implied, will be experimented on similarly. Lewis was remarkably prophetic.
This is legal but I can't legally pay another adult for sex or take drugs that could harm me? And there are many restrictions on gambling. It's weird how some morals are legislated but not others.
NEW VISTA, OUTER RIM—Just a cycle ago, the brain was in a living person. Now, hours after its first owner died, it sits on a slab draped in tubes that quiver as they pump liters of blood substitute and other fluids through the organ, supplying oxygen and removing waste. As far as anyone knows, with many of its key functions intact but maybe awarness muffled by drugs, the brain hovers between life and death. As people subject it to experimental drugs, sensors record the brain's reactions, capturing hundreds of data points on its cells, proteins, and physiology. Then, after 24 hours in this state, it will be sliced into hundreds of pieces for more detailed study.
It looks like the families have to agree to do this, before your brain can be donated:
> Bexorg obtains brains in partnership with organizations that procure donated organs for transplantation, and Vrselja says once families understand the company’s process and goals, their response is overwhelmingly positive.
Until we find out otherwise. There have been multiple organ harvesting scandals lately. Informed consent has become a marketing concept, no longer a reality.
"alive" is not a meaningful term. It makes sense only when you have blunt instruments to measure aliveness, like pulse, respiration, heart beat, etc.
Once you go much more granular, there's no particular spot to make a distinction between "alive" and "not alive", until you stop seeing any electrical, biochemical and mechanical activity of any kind, at which point you're basically saying "inert".
Is this dry humor and/or a deliberate attempt to make the reader even more horrified by the experiment? Or only a different sensibility from mine? No judgement. I just really can't tell.
The obvious question I would have asked: given the concern that this may not be ethical if the brains are still “alive” AND the concern that a brain separated from the body probably doesn’t function these same, why wouldn’t we test things in living monkeys (instead of mice)???
It seems that the likelihood is high that the right animal model would yield superior data???
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.
To 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.
This 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.
They 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.
This is literally my biggest fear. The idea that my biology or consciousness could be keep alive and in a state of suffering for years, decades, centuries or longer via neural simulation or biological intervention.
I do wonder if AI advancements will allow me to see these horrors play out. Hopefully not to myself.
I find it hard to believe the donors had any idea they were authorizing an experiment like this but sure hope I am wrong.
Reminds me of the Three Body Problem and sending a live brain to the cosmos because the tyranny of the rocket equation made a whole human impossible.
Live dissection and experimentation on “alive but drugged” human brains is mental. How do you ensure that you aren’t torturing a brain that can’t see, hear or scream? How are you held accountable?
Well, we know how to make living brains insensate - that's who we all make it through surgery.
Presumably they're doing something similar - or using some other well-understood mechanism - to ensure that's not the case.
> The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures. Bexorg obtains brains in partnership with organizations that procure donated organs for transplantation, and Vrselja says once families understand the company’s process and goals, their response is overwhelmingly positive.
That’s somewhat overstated.
We know anesthesia "works," and we know some of its molecular targets, but we do not fully know the mechanism by which it produces unconsciousness, ie whether anesthesia eliminates experience, or mainly blocks memory, report, and integrated neural processing.
Anesthesia appears to be a fairly broad effect - anaesthetics work on plants, for example [1], even though they lack any neural tissue whatsoever. It would be extremely surprising if those effects were also targeted enough to halt only some types of brain activity.
[1]: e.g. https://doi.org/10.4161/psb.27886
My understanding was that we now believe that patients under anesthesia are often "awake" but the drugs prevent them from forming memories so they can't complain once the anesthesia wears off.
Is that incorrect?
More like very rarely (1-2 per 1000), very partially aware. I could not find anything saying that it was common, and it appears cases of actual awareness to the point of having pain / trauma are far rarer still. People who have this tend to have foggy memories or other concrete PTSD symptoms after the fact. It does not appear to be the norm.
I still think this experimentation is absolutely insane and I strongly object because there is no way to get feedback from the "patient" after the fact. Since we have no real idea of what is happening, I believe we should err on the side of caution. "But they could consent beforehand" is not morally acceptable for intrinsically inhumane actions that take away fundamental human rights and dignity. So if you think this is possibly inhumane / potentially torture, it is an irrelevant point since true consent would be impossible.
That's how twilight anesthesia works. That's the kind you get when having something like wisdom tooth removal or an endoscopy. They want you to be responsive to instructions but completely relaxed and unable to form memories of the event.
"Anesthesia" is a wider umbrella term than most people realize with many levels of sedation.
Under "general anesthesia", the patient is completely unconscious. They don't respond to any stimuli. In rare cases, some patients may have an adverse reaction and still retain some sensation, but that's very uncommon. My understanding is that we are certain that patients are actually unconscious (and not just unable to respond) because none of the other involuntary responses to trauma occur during surgery: elevated heart rate, etc. In short, you are simply not there for a while. This is what you get for most kinds of significant surgeries unless the surgery requires you to be awake (like brain surgery where they may need to ask you questions).
"Sedation" or "twilight sedation" is a lower level of anesthesia. You are somewhat conscious and can respond to commands from the doctor. But you are unable to form memories of what's happening and you're usually on something like fentanyl that makes you entirely OK with whatever it is they are doing to you. This is common for procedures like colonoscopies and endoscopies where the procedure is somewhat uncomfortable but where you aren't being cut open.
In general, anesthesiologists are trying to balance the goal of patient comfort against the risks of deeper levels of sedation.
From the article:
> The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures.
I could've done without reading the word almost
Honestly, there is so much terrible terrible terrible stuff going on in the world and happening to real people, I think it is safe to say that those brains are having a blast. Relatively speaking.
It just invokes a strong emotional response because it's so "abnormal", but if you think about it, there is so much more pain going on where no one bats an eye.
Perfectly avoidable pain even. So it's not even that aspect.
___
OTOH, this is HN, I guess. Having empathy for real people would be harmful to the business model of most people's employers.
So instead, mostly performative outrage/empathy with something that is effectively dead can fill in that gap.
> I think it is safe to say that those brains are having a blast
How could you possibly say that? You are positing that the brains are both conscious and happy. Both of those are leaps.
> It just invokes a strong emotional response because it's so "abnormal"
You are making an assumption about why people find this horrifying, and the assumption you made was uncharitable.
> OTOH, this is HN, I guess. Having empathy for real people would be harmful to the business model of most people's employers.
I do not see how people on HN being horrified by human brain experiments means they do not have empathy.
That's before they apply the anaesthetic.
I recognized that anesthetic from its famous irresponsible use-
"Attention to the risks of off-label use of propofol increased in August 2009, after the release of the Los Angeles County coroner's report that musician Michael Jackson was killed by a mixture of propofol and the benzodiazepine drugs lorazepam, midazolam, and diazepam on 25 June 2009." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propofol
Used properly, however:
"To induce general anesthesia, propofol is the drug used almost exclusively, having largely replaced sodium thiopental."
Apparently MJ was taking propofol to sleep, which another commenter said was akin to "getting a haircut by undergoing chemo".
Between what he did to children, and what his parents did to him, it's hard to really blame the guy for having extreme sleep problems though.
> what he did to children
The media and the people who bought into their shameless attention-grabbing lies are the reason he had sleep problems. He was unanimously acquitted of all counts, but the media made his life into a living hell by consistently portraying him as a pedophile because it drove incredible engagement numbers. A justice system should be "innocent until proven guilty", and yet MJ was deemed guilty even after proven innocent. Longform read from an actually good journalist, if you care to learn for yourself: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/one-of-the-most-shameful_b_61...
I mean, he may have never done a sexual thing but his pedophilia was quite obvious and the degeneracy of parents to allow their children to spend the night in the bed of a grown man is not really good for society.
According to you. (And me, but just saying, society is a big place to be homogenized)
"he may have never done a sexual thing but his pedophilia was quite obvious"
How is it obvious pedophilia, if you say he may have never done a sexual thing to them?
because he paid families to sleep in beds and hang out with their children, this is not a normal adult man behavior, and defending it on the internet is weird.
There is a wide, wide range between "normal behaviour" and "sex offender". I'm fine with being weird, and have no qualms defending the right of other people to be weird.
Maybe he liked playing with children because adults are evil and only saw him as a moneybag to try to extricate a payday from. If he wasn't harming them, it's not my business.
It is not normal adult behavior and he likely should have had therapy.
But it is not necessarily pedophilia. Because that means wanting to have sex with children.
The explanation I heard is he wanted to be close to children to compensate for his own lack of innocent childhood. Children don't do sexual intercourse. Now if he was a child in his mind, then I as a parent would surely not have gave my children to his care, but this is still something very different from child molesting.
And you know this because of your firsthand experience observing it... or because the media told you so? Considering how readily the media is willing to lie for engagement, the truth is more likely to be the opposite of what they report.
It's not only not been proven, but the island man stuff and testimony of people like Culkin suggest he actually did the opposite of doing bad things to children and was most likely a scapegoat for the "elites" of Hollywood because of his race.
At the very least drop an "allegedly" or something to make it sound a little tasteful.
Here's a podcast deep diving into what it was he did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J1JQaIrxRU
That "another commenter" was Robin Williams - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fZkFooaaaSo
Oh wow, I can't believe he was on reddit!
Miss this brilliant man
—
Happy to’ve learn a URL trick on HN so I’ll reshare:
https://www.youtube.com/v/fZkFooaaaSo
oh, look, seems like we found the guy who can define what consciousness is! and not just that ... he even knows the lower boundary of it, too.
I think there is worlds between definitely defining what consciousness is, and what are some of the scenarios and conditions under which consciousness cannot ever happen.
And on top of that, they put a sedative, just in case.
my comment was meant a little bit humorous.
I don't trust them to always give the brain propofol. The subject has no way of reacting because they have no body, so what are they going to do?
The word "alive" is doing a lot of work here. A brain is pretty much permanently fried after five to fifteen minutes without oxygen, and these are donor brains, not some emergency brain extraction team, so the timeframe will be much longer than that. There might be 'life' left in there in the technical sense, but there's no 'person' left.
It's not a great article, and it glosses over the reality that if you hooked this brain up to an EEG it would show unequivocal brain death. CELLS of the brain are alive, but in terms of being able to function in any sort of coordinated way there that ship sailed minutes after the person who donated their organs died. The wave of depolarization that marks brain death isn't something we can reverse, and what's being done here is all about metabolism and structure rather than those much more subtle functions.
IMO the more questionable aspect of this entire operation is the use of "AI" to reach conclusions about how the test molecules are being metabolized, but that's a lot less compelling than implying that some company is somehow preserving life in a disembodied brain.
> isn't something we can reverse
Until you hook it up to a lightening rod in the top of a castle!
Just remember to be a good father, or things get really epic in a gothic sort of way.
Everyone upvote this guy more, thanks
Reminds me of a certain scene from Knausgård's Morning Star.
> Live dissection and experimentation on “alive but drugged” human brains is mental.
There’s no such thing as live dissection. It’s vivisection.
Brain does not have physical feelings, and with all other feelings cut off and not possible, even with consciousness it won’t be a horror scenario like in MetallicA’s “One”.
People go crazy in solitary confinement, and they at least have senses left. I’m not sure I’m as confident as you on this one.
I’ll volunteer to waive my rights here. Feel free to do whatever you wish with my brain once it’s detached from my body :)
Can’t be worse than my organs being harvested for donation.
It's still an open debate whether the seat of consciousness (or even simpler, perception) is the brain.
see e.g. Wahbeh, H., Radin, D., Cannard, C., & Delorme, A. (2022). What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain? Observational and empirical challenges to materialistic models. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 955594. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.955594
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
Same for memory, which is "needed" as well for your question to make sense. The more current theories assume memories are stored not only in the brain, but throughout the body.
see e.g. Repetto, C., & Riva, G. (2023). The neuroscience of body memory: Recent findings and conceptual advances. EXCLI journal, 22, 191–206. https://doi.org/10.17179/excli2023-5877
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_memory
See also: Hridaya.
I believe to some extent that everything is conscious and that it's specifically our species' prized mental features that lessen it's level at least temporarily. purely esoterically the statement "a rock is more conscious than a human being" doesn't even seem too outrageous to me.
Ok, I only skimmed the paper but it seems like all of the "non-local phenomena" in support of their theory are basically psychic powers. Not exactly strong evidence.
You're free to stop there. We can also turn it around, and I can ask you for any paper that details the theory of why the brain should be the location of consciousness.
I only gave one example and Wikipedia to start with. There's a lot of material out there if you're (rightfully) skeptical of that one paper. I don't even know what you're refering to as "their theory", as the way I read it, they're basically documenting various co-existing theories, and the authors don't disclose which one they find the most likely. I also don't see it as necessary for science to pick one; it's all about theories. I prefer documentation of all possible theories, and see no reason to dismiss one over the other unless they're disproven. I pointed to that paper, because any paper that talks about alternative theories shows the point I was making: We don't know yet. The point was not to claim that they've managed to put together good or bad arguments.
Sure. We can't even agree on a good definition for "consciousness", we certainly don't know _how_ it works. I don't think there's a lot of debate around that specific point.
I'll try and read the paper more carefully after work, but my quick read was: they posit that consciousness might not be localized in the brain because if it were, then how would people be able to perform telepathy / remote viewing / future foresight? I can't assert that their non-local hypothesis is wrong, but I can pretty confidently say that the evidence they're using to back it up is unscientific BS.
When I had my ear surgery about 20 years ago, the doctor explained to me that I would be awake for part of the procedure, but the anesthesia meant that I would have no memory of it.¹ It’s a weird thing to think about whether that lack of memory would obviate the pain or discomfort of the moment.
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1. As it turned out, I was so frightened in the lead-up to the surgery that they had to do general anesthesia on me because I was shaking too much for them to operate so I was unconscious for the whole thing.
> so I was unconscious for the whole thing
Or so they claim - the patient would have no memory of that anyway.
Purely anecdotal, but I had surgery a few years ago (relatively minor). But I could feel for months after a sort of 'unconscious PSTD' I don't know how else to describe it. Even after it was healed and the pain was gone, there was just a deep sense of 'something bad happened in there' feeling. I'd have dreams of someone digging around in my body. Anyway, it's all gone now, but a weird experience for sure.
PTSD can happen especially when something goes wrong with the anesthesia. Happened to a man named Sherman Sizemore many years ago: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/family-sues-after...
Dramatized retelling of the story at 21m04s: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ny_s07D-LT8&t=1264s
I had the same thoughts "but won't i feel it THEN?" when I was getting an upper endoscopy. The anesthesiologist said you're in such a trance, dreamlike state plus with the inability to form memories its like you're not your real "consciousness" but something different. Sort of like your brain is in "limp mode" and its not really _you._ This was both comforting and slightly terrifying in a different way.
Obviously it would be worse if you remembered it, but the trauma is still there even if you don't. Ask Bill Cosby's victims.
“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 Activity recorded M.Y. 2302.22467 (TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED)
Give credit where credit is due: Descartes, Kant, Putnam, etc.
It'll be Brian Reynolds in this case. It's a quote from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
Hmm pretty sure I saw this in the thought traces of Claude the other day...
Meditations on First Philosophy messed me up bad. All of Descartes’ reasoning about the inability to determine whether experience was real made complete sense to me. But when I got to where he started to try to build back reality, I didn’t buy it. I can only believe in reality by willfully forgetting Descartes.
This makes me feel physically ill. It's like something straight out of a sci-fi dystopia, how did this get approved? Who determined that reinjecting biological activity into a human brain is definitely not some form of reanimation? If they're using heavy sedation to prevent electrical activity, is that not tacit admission they're not 100% sure that consciousness might return otherwise? How did this pass ethics review, or did they even bother?
Dude we can't revive brains minutes after cardiac arrest, when they're inside their bodies, even when we're TRYING TO DO SO. You can think about "what if" if you like the though experiment, but seriously arguing that there's any way that brains could recover consciousness the next day because you gave them nutrients is like arguing that voyager could crash back on earth and injure someone after being flung backwards around a loose interstellar body.
I just finished reading "That Hideous Strength" (CS Lewis) this weekend where they have a disembodied head kept "alive", and some convicts in the pipeline whose heads/brains, it is implied, will be experimented on similarly. Lewis was remarkably prophetic.
The Dust Theory in Permutation City by Greg Egan pushes the concept to bizarre levels.
Greg Egan is a legend
This is legal but I can't legally pay another adult for sex or take drugs that could harm me? And there are many restrictions on gambling. It's weird how some morals are legislated but not others.
This provides humanity with a greater good than gambling
So did Nazi eugenics.
How so?
NEW VISTA, OUTER RIM—Just a cycle ago, the brain was in a living person. Now, hours after its first owner died, it sits on a slab draped in tubes that quiver as they pump liters of blood substitute and other fluids through the organ, supplying oxygen and removing waste. As far as anyone knows, with many of its key functions intact but maybe awarness muffled by drugs, the brain hovers between life and death. As people subject it to experimental drugs, sensors record the brain's reactions, capturing hundreds of data points on its cells, proteins, and physiology. Then, after 24 hours in this state, it will be sliced into hundreds of pieces for more detailed study.
I will be removing my organ donor status. This is horrifying.
It looks like the families have to agree to do this, before your brain can be donated:
> Bexorg obtains brains in partnership with organizations that procure donated organs for transplantation, and Vrselja says once families understand the company’s process and goals, their response is overwhelmingly positive.
Until we find out otherwise. There have been multiple organ harvesting scandals lately. Informed consent has become a marketing concept, no longer a reality.
Citation required. Specifically for a western country happening at any notable scale via organ donors.
Citation: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/us/kentucky-organ-donatio...
Organ harvesting of living patients hasn't fully scaled up as a practice yet, but it's definitely a major source of income for some rural hospitals.
Can't the donor stipulate take anything but the brain?
"alive" is not a meaningful term. It makes sense only when you have blunt instruments to measure aliveness, like pulse, respiration, heart beat, etc.
Once you go much more granular, there's no particular spot to make a distinction between "alive" and "not alive", until you stop seeing any electrical, biochemical and mechanical activity of any kind, at which point you're basically saying "inert".
And yet, "my child is alive" versus "my child is dead" have some… meaning.
With what we are learning about how gut flora, can a brain be considered conscious while detached from the digestive system?
Is this dry humor and/or a deliberate attempt to make the reader even more horrified by the experiment? Or only a different sensibility from mine? No judgement. I just really can't tell.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
We don't create the torment nexus, we are creating all the possible torment nexuses
There is a documentary about this:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052646/mediaviewer/rm713036545...
A nice reminder to not check the "organ donor" box at the DMV
The obvious question I would have asked: given the concern that this may not be ethical if the brains are still “alive” AND the concern that a brain separated from the body probably doesn’t function these same, why wouldn’t we test things in living monkeys (instead of mice)???
It seems that the likelihood is high that the right animal model would yield superior data???
Let me add Johnny Got His Gun to the surprisingly large number of works that seem to anticipate exactly this premise.
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.
To 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.
This 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.
They 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.
Does this tech take us one step closer to a human brain in a robot body, or some kind of simulated reality?
That's demonic creativity.
This is literally my biggest fear. The idea that my biology or consciousness could be keep alive and in a state of suffering for years, decades, centuries or longer via neural simulation or biological intervention.
I do wonder if AI advancements will allow me to see these horrors play out. Hopefully not to myself.
https://spikeartmagazine.com/articles/libra-season-hello-cru...
They have no mouth and they must scream...
What the fuck? This is beyond the pale.
“We'll send only a brain"
Just no.