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aetherspawn 13 hours ago [-]
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?
dhosek 11 hours ago [-]
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.
yoyohello13 11 hours ago [-]
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.
There's also the movie Awake (2007) incorporating this element of being aware but unable to communicate it.
_factor 9 hours ago [-]
I have vivid dreams and smells from a surgery where the visions and feeling of them poking me are incredibly intense. The question is whether it’s a memory or a manifestation of fear. I rarely dream (every few years), but this vivid dream comes through on occasion.
VectorLock 11 hours ago [-]
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.
TurdF3rguson 10 hours ago [-]
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.
andy99 10 hours ago [-]
I had a dentist explain to me the same for getting my wisdom teeth out, as if it was a selling feature. At least for me, having my memory wiped is far more scary than just being put unconscious (or having some pain and a local anaesthetic).
mitthrowaway2 7 hours ago [-]
A colleague warned me of the same when I was having my wisdom teeth removed. As a result, while I was being put under, I was very focused on the effects of the anaesthetic. I feel about as confident as one can be that I was completely unconscious during the entire operation. I remember the surgeon asking me to count to ten, and the specific feeling of my vision melting and swirling around, before suddenly waking up with the surgery over.
When I wake up from dreams, even with no memory of them, I sometimes have "a memory of a memory"; the tip-of-tge-tongue feeling that there's something interesting I'd experienced, but which I now can't remember what it was. But with the anaesthetic, there wasn't anything like that at all.
MattPalmer1086 31 minutes ago [-]
Similar for me, although I did not realise I had gone under. I counted to ten, and when I reached ten I opened my eyes and was in a different room and the surgery was over. Very weird!
dhosek 6 hours ago [-]
I was one of the last if not the last patient the dentist who took out my wisdom teeth gave general anesthesia to (at my request, he was normally only doing local). Afterwards, the whole dental office staff (and my mother!) entertained themselves with having conversations with my incoherent self as I came out of the anesthesia. Apparently, I declared that I was ruined and would never be able to sing opera again (point in fact, I had never sang opera before).
Fr0styMatt88 6 hours ago [-]
Had a few eye surgeries (vitrectomies) under sedation, no pain but lots of flashing lights and lots of kaleidoscope patterns. It was pretty wild.
I was lucky that coming out of sedation was actually fantastic, like the only time I can remember feeling that blissfully relaxed was in maybe a few beach holidays I went on as a kid.
General anaesthetic scares me way more.
Gooblebrai 10 hours 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
The short story "Transition Dreams" by Greg Egan touches on this concept
Filligree 9 hours ago [-]
I can strongly recommend reading... anything else by Egan, just not that one.
It's not that it's bad. The problem's the opposite: He poses an existentially dreadful question which I can't definitively answer with 'no'.
Gooblebrai 2 hours ago [-]
That's what I love about this short in particular. Existential Sci-Fi!
thih9 11 hours ago [-]
> so I was unconscious for the whole thing
Or so they claim - the patient would have no memory of that anyway.
dhosek 5 hours ago [-]
The doctor who did the surgery was arguably the best doctor I’ve ever interacted with in my 57 years of life. He was horrible at starting appointments on time (much to the frustration of his staff) because he would spend as long as he felt necessary with each patient, regardless of what the scheduled appointment length was. He was essentially at war with insurance companies about coverage limitations (for the procedure, a stapedectomy, insurance companies wanted to have this be an outpatient procedure but he felt it was better for patients not to have to be in a car immediately after surgery so he informed patients beforehand that they would be checking in as an outpatient and he would declare complications after surgery that required an overnight hospital stay. Similarly, the antibiotic that the insurance companies had as their preferred formulary had a tendency to kill hair cells which made it a bad choice for in-ear application. All of his patients were advised that they had an allergy to this antibiotic and thus would have to be prescribed his preferred antibiotic). So, with this doctor, if he told me that the moon was made of green cheese, I would believe him without reservation.
steve-atx-7600 6 hours ago [-]
Colonoscopies used to be like this in the US more often (“you’ll be awake but won’t remember it”). I feel bad for the me that existed in that time window of discomfort. 20 years later they did general anesthesia (family history of colon cancer).
8 hours ago [-]
WithinReason 3 hours ago [-]
...or that's what they told you afterward 0_0
garethsprice 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Barbing 12 hours ago [-]
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."
stavros 12 hours ago [-]
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.
applfanboysbgon 12 hours ago [-]
> 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...
openasocket 10 hours ago [-]
That article was written 16 years ago and misses a lot as a result. it doesn’t mention the new allegations, including those documented in Leaving Neverland. It also glosses over the accusations in the 1990s. It’s papered over that those allegations were lies, but he settled the lawsuit with them for over $23M.
applfanboysbgon 10 hours ago [-]
Settling isn't an admission of guilt. It's plausible that he wanted to avoid the media circus that would inevitably result, and given that fighting it out in court was significantly more damaging to his reputation than settling the 90s case was despite being exonerated, he was probably right to settle. The article does also touch on the indications that those allegations were also not credible, although it doesn't do a deep dive.
I don't give much credence to new allegations. Where were these allegations when he was alive, and why are people still publishing documentaries? You don't need a documentary to make an allegation. They're doing it because they want to make money, then. Off a dead man, who can't defend himself.
> Over the years, Jackson and the estate have paid out millions to settle various claims, with some lawsuits still pending without ever admitting wrongdoing. A significant reason for the large settlement totaling about $25 million made by Jackson in 1994 to the Chandler family and their lawyer was the drawing of specific markings Jackson had on his penis caused by the skin condition vitiligo.
> Jordie Chandler drew the markings and the drawing was put into a sealed envelope. During the criminal investigation, Jackson was so resistant to having his genitals photographed that he slapped one of his doctors. It didn’t matter for the civil suit. My reporting showed that when Jordie’s drawing was unsealed, it matched the photos.
Barbing 2 hours ago [-]
That poor kid
openasocket 8 hours ago [-]
> I don't give much credence to new allegations. Where were these allegations when he was alive
It’s worth noting that it’s common for it to take years or decades for victims to speak out against an abuser. Especially when the victims are children. Especially when the abuser is a prominent figure, like the literal King of Pop.
I’m not going to try and convince you that these allegations are credible (though I believe they are), I just want you to think about how a child victim might behave in that situation. There’s almost never any objective evidence or 3rd party witnesses of abuse. It’s almost always the word of one person against another. And it may be years before a child victim even fully understands what was happening, and years beyond that to come to terms with it.
applfanboysbgon 7 hours ago [-]
The most recent allegations are from the Cascios. Frank Cascio turned 18 in 1999. He would have been 30 by 2011, when he was writing a book and in the media defending Michael. He tried to get the book turned into a documentary, but when that fell through, he instead extorted Jackson's estate for millions of dollars by threatening to make public allegations, and then did it anyways despite being paid off, allegedly after trying to extort the estate again for $200 million.
Another big allegation is from Wade Robson, who has turned the accusations into two documentaries. Wade Robson was 25 years old when, in 2005, he testified under oath that Jackson had never abused him as one of the witnesses called by the defense. He is now suing the Jackson estate for $400 million.
It's not like I can't imagine a child victim growing up and taking time to come to terms with abuse, but these people were actively defending him as fully mature adults, only to suddenly turrn on his estate for some reason. I see a pattern in the accusations, and that pattern is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
sokoloff 8 hours ago [-]
> yet MJ was deemed guilty even after proven innocent.
He was not “proven innocent”; that’s not how the legal system works. He was “found not guilty” which is a much lower standard than “proven innocent”.
(OJ Simpson was similarly found not guilty; do you think he was also “proven innocent”?)
applfanboysbgon 7 hours ago [-]
I am aware. Being pedantically correct would ruin the intended rhetorical point of reversing the standard phrase, though. "Deemed guilty even after found not guilty" just doesn't really work. I even knew I was going to get a reply about OJ when I wrote it. Miscarriages of justice certainly do happen, but still we should broadly presume innocence until proven guilty, and none of the evidence or testimony in MJ's case came close to being as compelling as OJ's, nor was there any indication that the jury was making a political statement by acquitting.
appletrotter 5 hours ago [-]
> Being pedantically correct would ruin the intended rhetorical point of reversing the standard phrase, though
Maybe it's a sign
iwontberude 11 hours ago [-]
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.
lukan 11 hours ago [-]
"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?
hilariously 11 hours ago [-]
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.
lukan 10 hours ago [-]
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.
applfanboysbgon 11 hours ago [-]
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.
jp_sc 11 hours ago [-]
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.
jvanderbot 11 hours ago [-]
According to you. (And me, but just saying, society is a big place to be homogenized)
malbs 11 hours ago [-]
Here's a podcast deep diving into what it was he did.
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.
raffael_de 11 hours ago [-]
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.
trklausss 11 hours ago [-]
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.
raffael_de 11 hours ago [-]
my comment was meant a little bit humorous.
joegibbs 11 hours ago [-]
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?
BalinKing 9 hours ago [-]
Towards the end of the article: "the company plans to eventually remove the anesthesia from some brain slices"
Here's hoping the idea is that the slices will be really small, or something, because frankly the whole thing is utterly horrifying enough as-is.
1234letshaveatw 12 hours ago [-]
I could've done without reading the word almost
pavel_lishin 12 hours ago [-]
That's before they apply the anaesthetic.
12 hours ago [-]
hypfer 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wewtyflakes 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
koolba 12 hours ago [-]
> Live dissection and experimentation on “alive but drugged” human brains is mental.
There’s no such thing as live dissection. It’s vivisection.
rootsudo 6 hours ago [-]
This, exactly.
Every other part of the human body is understandable but the brain.
Reading the article and imagining its you, sheeeeesh. I really wonder how this passed ethical review. Yes the brain is an organ, and yes there’s probably consent and the body is officially proclaimed dead and this is near the best way to really extrapolate the empirical data prior to alive human trials.
But damn this article is a combination of words I did not want to read today nor imagine.
pavel_lishin 13 hours ago [-]
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.
gavmor 12 hours ago [-]
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.
gwern 10 hours ago [-]
The most important thing to know about anesthesia in the context of OP is that it often doesn't work. 'Anesthesia awareness' is real and probably more common than we think because anesthesia can easily produce awareness but block memory formation.
"What did the doctor say? He told me that they couldn’t up the anesthetic because an overdose could cause respiratory arrest, and that it wouldn’t matter because the
anaesthetic on any dose caused severe short term memory loss and whatever happened the patient would forget all about it.
The second point, at least, was right on. One patient spent the entire procedure writhing in agony and screaming something incoherent to God. The doctor finished the procedure, took out the endoscope, and cut off the anesthetic, and the patient turned his head, looked the doctor right in the eye, smiled, and said, laughing “Wow, that wasn’t bad at all!
Guess I slept right through it!”"
duskwuff 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Is that incorrect?
munificent 11 hours ago [-]
"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.
sgc 11 hours ago [-]
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.
ziml77 11 hours ago [-]
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.
10 hours ago [-]
rendx 11 hours ago [-]
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
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.
rendx 11 hours ago [-]
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.
hackingonempty 4 hours ago [-]
We understand the fundamental laws of physics well enough to say there is not some mysterious soul influencing the brain. Just like we can say that the moon is not made from cheese.
> Modern physics, in other words, provides evidence for what philosophers call “causal closure of the physical”: physical events have purely physical causes (Loewer 1995, Papineau 1995), at least in the regime relevant to human life. Without dramatically upending our understanding of quantum field theory, there is no room for any new influences that could bear on the problem of consciousness.
> We understand the fundamental laws of physics well enough to say there is not some mysterious soul influencing the brain. Just like we can say that the moon is not made from cheese.
I don't see how this relates to the "seat of consciousness" (with)in a human body, or how the biological system works together to "form it". Or where thinking or memory storage or retrieval takes place. At least that was what I was talking about. You're talking about something else.
It is a theory that we think in the brain. As far as I understand it, and please prove me wrong, there are other, valid theories? It's unscientific to discard theories purely based on belief. You seem to be arguing from a certain belief, not from science.
The modern term for "soul" is "psyche".
Remember that the OP was asking: "How do you ensure that you aren’t torturing a brain that can’t see, hear or scream?" -- clearly refering to something... conscious?
ywain 10 hours ago [-]
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.
cogman10 9 hours ago [-]
> It's still an open debate
No it's not, not by anyone serious.
We know the brain is the seat of consciousness because damage to the brain damages consciousness. There is no other organ in the body where that's true. You can completely replace all other organs without changing consciousness.
You can always find a paper by a quack that posits the earth is flat, that doesn't mean there's serious debate.
rendx 3 hours ago [-]
Can you point me to a paper or other source that proves that the brain is the seat of consciousness? Or that disproves other theories?
I am familiar with the works of Oliver Sacks, Paul Broks, and others, who have spent their lives researching damage to brains and the potential consequences for the psyche. I agree that it sounds like damage to the brain can have big impact, but none of that research, as far as I am aware, proves or even tries to argue that the brain is the only component necessary for consciousness to exist.
I am not interested in beliefs in one theory over another. I am not even asking for probabilities. I am asking for a scientific approach, which is to detail all possible (potentially fringe) theories until they're proven wrong. Anything else is the business of religion.
Singer, J., & Damasio, A. (2025). The physiology of interoception and its adaptive role in consciousness. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 380(1939), 20240305. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0305
We think that organs can be replaced with little apparent change in consciousness (- this is an active research area, too, by the way). There is also research into how body tissues may form a part of what other theories place exclusively in the brain.
Aderinto, N., Olatunji, G., Kokori, E., Ogieuhi, I. J., Moradeyo, A., Woldehana, N. A., Lawal, Z. D., Adetunji, B., Assi, G., Nazar, M. W., & Adebayo, Y. A. (2025). A narrative review on the psychosocial domains of the impact of organ transplantation. Discover mental health, 5(1), 20. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44192-025-00148-y
> "Having its own enteric nervous system, sometimes referred to as the “second brain,” the gut is also an immune organ and has a large surface area interacting with gut microbiota. The gut has been shown to play an important role in many physiological processes, and may arguably do so as well in perception and cognition."
Boem F, Greslehner GP, Konsman JP and Chiu L (2024) Minding the gut: extending embodied cognition and perception to the gut complex. Front. Neurosci. 17:1172783. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2023.1172783
rcxdude 1 hours ago [-]
If you're going full philosophy of science, are these alternative theories falsifiable in the first place? Much of this kind of argument turns into philosophy and metaphysics instead of empirical science.
raffael_de 11 hours ago [-]
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.
echelon_musk 11 hours ago [-]
See also: Hridaya.
EA-3167 13 hours ago [-]
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.
genxy 12 hours ago [-]
> isn't something we can reverse
Until you hook it up to a lightening rod in the top of a castle!
EA-3167 12 hours ago [-]
Just remember to be a good father, or things get really epic in a gothic sort of way.
mikeweiss 7 hours ago [-]
So your saying you would be comfortable putting yourself on the donor list then?
EA-3167 5 hours ago [-]
Sure, the key point here is that you die first. Squeamishness is for the living, who have increasingly desperate need of neurological medicines.
DontBreakAlex 11 hours ago [-]
Everyone upvote this guy more, thanks
crooked-v 13 hours ago [-]
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.
kreyenborgi 13 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of a certain scene from Knausgård's Morning Star.
cj 12 hours ago [-]
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.
dostick 12 hours ago [-]
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”.
ceejayoz 11 hours ago [-]
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.
ethanrutherford 13 hours ago [-]
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?
willis936 8 hours ago [-]
Approved? Ethics review? This is a private company. I was shocked when NYT Daily casually mentioned this exact behavior at Altos last week and just laughed it off. Like what is funny about making infinite torture machines because billionaires want to live forever?
I think for direct comparison, the way of re-animating the brain described in the article would need to be attempted on the cardiac arrest patient as well so as to be sure it isn’t a “revival”-capable method
Might already be an obvious answer to practitioners in the field
DontBreakAlex 7 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that after a few minutes without oxygen, the chemistry inside your brain is "fucked up" and even if you get oxygen back it's gone, you're already a vegetable. I like to think that "the state of the machine is gone" but I'm not a doctor
wanoir 4 hours ago [-]
> even if you get oxygen back it's gone, you're already a vegetable
I think that's the part that might get people though.
Since a comatose brain is not necessarily fully gone
So I guess the question is what differentiates a comatose brain from one that is no longer capable of consciousness?
acheron 13 hours ago [-]
“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)
gavmor 12 hours ago [-]
Give credit where credit is due: Descartes, Kant, Putnam, etc.
dhosek 11 hours ago [-]
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.
transitorykris 7 hours ago [-]
It’s really a solipsistic philosophy. The awkwardness of it was the fact he had a king and the church to appease in his arguments. Willfully forgetting Descartes is one way of dealing with it! (..or plotting a path out of it by reading him as a proto-existentialist)
willis936 8 hours ago [-]
But take comfort in knowing you are not the void. Cogito ergo sum. It's the only true refute of solipsism.
sodaplayer 12 hours ago [-]
It'll be Brian Reynolds in this case. It's a quote from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
mattlondon 12 hours ago [-]
Hmm pretty sure I saw this in the thought traces of Claude the other day...
prewett 13 hours ago [-]
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.
renticulous 13 hours ago [-]
The Dust Theory in Permutation City by Greg Egan pushes the concept to bizarre levels.
bicx 11 hours ago [-]
Greg Egan is a legend
quirk 7 hours ago [-]
Came here to say this. The Space Trilogy is one of the best series I've ever read. That Hideous Strength reminds me a LOT of what's happening these days. Even moreso than 1984. Would love to see a great director tackle it as a film.
NDlurker 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Aboutplants 13 hours ago [-]
This provides humanity with a greater good than gambling
throwaway613746 12 hours ago [-]
So did Nazi eugenics.
adi_kurian 11 hours ago [-]
How so?
trallnag 3 hours ago [-]
Eugenics under the national socialists was extreme and twisted. But it still was about eugenics at its core. Even today we apply practices of eugenics, for example with prenatal screening for down syndrome followed by abortion. Gambling sets a very low bar when it comes to upsides.
croes 5 hours ago [-]
All you mentioned can have negative side effects for third parties.
booleandilemma 9 hours ago [-]
Can't make having fun too easy. It ruins the control the elites have over us.
croes 5 hours ago [-]
Drugs and gambling are ways to get controlled
cduzz 13 hours ago [-]
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.
10 hours ago [-]
abtinf 13 hours ago [-]
I will be removing my organ donor status. This is horrifying.
pavel_lishin 13 hours ago [-]
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.
smeggysmeg 11 hours ago [-]
Until we find out otherwise. There have been multiple organ harvesting scandals lately. Informed consent has become a marketing concept, no longer a reality.
tyre 11 hours ago [-]
Citation required. Specifically for a western country happening at any notable scale via organ donors.
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.
aceofspades19 8 hours ago [-]
The claim was there was multiple "organ harvesting scandals". Upon reading, it seems like the system worked, the doctors refused to retrieve the organs because the patient showed signs of life. It also looks like they have worked to put in place stricter protocols for organ retrieval since then.
I would say accidentally mistaking the patient is dead in any case is hardly the same as purposefully harvesting the organs from people they know are alive to get paid. The article does not state any evidence to suggest they are doing this.
There is obviously going to be some pressure to make a decision to retrieve the organs in the interest of not wasting something that could save another's life as there is a limited time frame where these organs can be viable. There is a huge distinction between that and going to patients that have no doubt they are alive and harvesting their organs.
dnnddidiej 11 hours ago [-]
Can't the donor stipulate take anything but the brain?
JimTheMan 9 hours ago [-]
I highly highly doubt that by consenting to be an organ donor you are consenting to this.
Unless you live in some incredibly lawless country?
Organ donation is so very sensitive, and those who use the service are so aware of the sensitivities I think that you'd be insane to have such a reaction to this media piece.
In fact, I'll go one further. I have serious doubts you were ever an organ donor at all.
abtinf 7 hours ago [-]
Your doubts are solidly founded; I can confirm I am not yet dead and my organs have not yet been donated.
unsupp0rted 14 hours ago [-]
"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".
oh_my_goodness 12 hours ago [-]
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.
ceejayoz 13 hours ago [-]
And yet, "my child is alive" versus "my child is dead" have some… meaning.
lapetitejort 13 hours ago [-]
With what we are learning about how gut flora, can a brain be considered conscious while detached from the digestive system?
hokkos 13 hours ago [-]
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
ReptileMan 12 hours ago [-]
We don't create the torment nexus, we are creating all the possible torment nexuses
cogogo 10 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
saalweachter 12 hours ago [-]
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.
bsimpson 11 hours ago [-]
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.
scratchyone 10 hours ago [-]
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.
It's not the same as what you suggest, but there's still hope you could regain consciousness, and this is a process that some companies already have infrastructure for. It is pretty expensive though.
FrinkleFrankle 5 hours ago [-]
True. You'd probably go crazy as a brain disconnected from your body, regardless of what drugs they give you.. But It'd be an interesting final experience, I guess. I do hope they're getting pain killers along with the anaesthesia, though.
jjk166 11 hours ago [-]
Let me add Johnny Got His Gun to the surprisingly large number of works that seem to anticipate exactly this premise.
efitz 9 hours ago [-]
As long as this practice is legal then I am unwilling to be an organ donor.
JimTheMan 9 hours ago [-]
All of these comments are making me realise that the US is an incredibly low trust environment, where people think horrific things are going to happen to them without the their/or their families consent.
And who am I to judge? Maybe that is the reality.
BalinKing 8 hours ago [-]
> horrific things are going to happen to them without the their/or their families consent
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???
ReptileMan 12 hours ago [-]
They have no mouth and they must scream...
croes 5 hours ago [-]
So the definition of being dead is an individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead.
Does this mean the donor was (1) or can the "revive" after (2)?
kypro 12 hours ago [-]
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.
A nice reminder to not check the "organ donor" box at the DMV
aussieguy1234 11 hours ago [-]
Does this tech take us one step closer to a human brain in a robot body, or some kind of simulated reality?
akomtu 11 hours ago [-]
That's demonic creativity.
aftbit 12 hours ago [-]
“We'll send only a brain"
jpwesselink 13 hours ago [-]
Just no.
hungryhobbit 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tomhow 55 minutes ago [-]
Please avoid flamebait and generic tangents on HN. The guidelines are clear that we're meant to make an effort to discuss the primary topic substantively.
Is there really a distinction between torturing humans and torturing pets? Aside from torture being torture, pets are members of people's families!
jolmg 10 hours ago [-]
> pets are members of people's families!
If you could only rescue one member from some kind of deadly emergency and they had equal chances, would you prioritize the pet over a human member of your family?
runjake 9 hours ago [-]
>> pets are members of people's families!
> If you could only rescue one member from some kind of deadly emergency and they had equal chances, would you prioritize the pet over a human member of your family?
If you could only rescue one family member from some kind of deadly emergency and they had equal chances, would you prioritize a stranger over a member of your family?
jolmg 7 hours ago [-]
> would you prioritize a stranger over a member of your family?
I'll preface by saying that I don't have a pet. However, if one had to burn alive between a stranger's little girl and my cat, it's easier to empathize, "what if that were my daughter?". It's easy to imagine the father's pain, and because the girl is human, it's easier to imagine what might be going on in the little girl's head as well. As the heat's becoming too strong for her to bear, it's easier to imagine her expression, her pain, and her fear.
It's harder to imagine and empathize with what might be going on through a cat's head. They don't think as we do and don't express themselves as we do. It's not like one can't anthropomorphize and empathize that way, but it's not the same as empathizing with a human. It's harder to imagine and feel their thoughts and emotions to the same level of detail.
I'd feel for the cat, but I think the girl burning alive would give me the worse nightmares.
makeitdouble 9 hours ago [-]
Legal/social consequences weight into your question.
A more straightforward angle could be money spent: would someone spend more for the wellbeing of their pet than for a family member (elderlies included).
klausa 7 hours ago [-]
I would save my cat before a distant cousin I met like four times in my life, absolutely.
stirfish 10 hours ago [-]
If I had to choose between my cat and my daughter...
Hell, if I had to choose between MY cat and YOUR daughter, the choice would will be easy
something765478 9 hours ago [-]
Why not? There's a difference between castrating a human and castrating an animal, right?
gblargg 7 hours ago [-]
> MASS TORTURE MILLIONS OF NON-PET ANIMALS EVERY YEAR ... just so we can all have cheaper Big Macs.
Torture - the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding) to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure.
marshray 6 hours ago [-]
Oh the dictionary defines a word, that makes it completely different then
juliend2 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
rootsudo 6 hours ago [-]
This was also my first thought in defense and to spot my hypocrisy. I spent many a minute going back and forth why am I judging a brain that lived a life and is “dead” more the the potential of a life, stem cell research, abortion in general and I gotta admit it was a invoking thought experiment.
I’m still on the acceptance side of abortion, stem cell research and other things like human cloning. They advance science, reduce human suffering - yes I get abortion doesn’t fit there exactly but it should be the mothers/parents right to ave access to abortion. All very political and highly debatable points today.
I understand if I accept that, what’s accepting experimentation on a brain dead brain - it should be a no brainer.
Easier because it’s just an artifact of a person that’s deceased but it is easy to invoke imagery in my own brain of an eternal torture chamber, someone’s consciousness locked away never recoverable or removable undergoing this amount of pain, but also is it pain if it can’t feel it?
The bodies other organs, it’s easy to dismiss as collections of cells, etc but: the brain just makes it harder to justify because it is the organ we use to interpret the world and imagining a world of pain and wondering what if that is the layer we are in now… is just scary.
⸻
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.
Dramatized retelling of the story at 21m04s: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ny_s07D-LT8&t=1264s
When I wake up from dreams, even with no memory of them, I sometimes have "a memory of a memory"; the tip-of-tge-tongue feeling that there's something interesting I'd experienced, but which I now can't remember what it was. But with the anaesthetic, there wasn't anything like that at all.
I was lucky that coming out of sedation was actually fantastic, like the only time I can remember feeling that blissfully relaxed was in maybe a few beach holidays I went on as a kid.
General anaesthetic scares me way more.
The short story "Transition Dreams" by Greg Egan touches on this concept
It's not that it's bad. The problem's the opposite: He poses an existentially dreadful question which I can't definitively answer with 'no'.
Or so they claim - the patient would have no memory of that anyway.
> 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.
"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."
—
Happy to’ve learn a URL trick on HN so I’ll reshare:
https://www.youtube.com/v/fZkFooaaaSo
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 don't give much credence to new allegations. Where were these allegations when he was alive, and why are people still publishing documentaries? You don't need a documentary to make an allegation. They're doing it because they want to make money, then. Off a dead man, who can't defend himself.
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/film/michael-jacksons-biopi...:
> Over the years, Jackson and the estate have paid out millions to settle various claims, with some lawsuits still pending without ever admitting wrongdoing. A significant reason for the large settlement totaling about $25 million made by Jackson in 1994 to the Chandler family and their lawyer was the drawing of specific markings Jackson had on his penis caused by the skin condition vitiligo.
> Jordie Chandler drew the markings and the drawing was put into a sealed envelope. During the criminal investigation, Jackson was so resistant to having his genitals photographed that he slapped one of his doctors. It didn’t matter for the civil suit. My reporting showed that when Jordie’s drawing was unsealed, it matched the photos.
It’s worth noting that it’s common for it to take years or decades for victims to speak out against an abuser. Especially when the victims are children. Especially when the abuser is a prominent figure, like the literal King of Pop.
I’m not going to try and convince you that these allegations are credible (though I believe they are), I just want you to think about how a child victim might behave in that situation. There’s almost never any objective evidence or 3rd party witnesses of abuse. It’s almost always the word of one person against another. And it may be years before a child victim even fully understands what was happening, and years beyond that to come to terms with it.
Another big allegation is from Wade Robson, who has turned the accusations into two documentaries. Wade Robson was 25 years old when, in 2005, he testified under oath that Jackson had never abused him as one of the witnesses called by the defense. He is now suing the Jackson estate for $400 million.
It's not like I can't imagine a child victim growing up and taking time to come to terms with abuse, but these people were actively defending him as fully mature adults, only to suddenly turrn on his estate for some reason. I see a pattern in the accusations, and that pattern is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
He was not “proven innocent”; that’s not how the legal system works. He was “found not guilty” which is a much lower standard than “proven innocent”.
(OJ Simpson was similarly found not guilty; do you think he was also “proven innocent”?)
Maybe it's a sign
How is it obvious pedophilia, if you say he may have never done a sexual thing to them?
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J1JQaIrxRU
At the very least drop an "allegedly" or something to make it sound a little tasteful.
And on top of that, they put a sedative, just in case.
Here's hoping the idea is that the slices will be really small, or something, because frankly the whole thing is utterly horrifying enough as-is.
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.
There’s no such thing as live dissection. It’s vivisection.
Every other part of the human body is understandable but the brain.
Reading the article and imagining its you, sheeeeesh. I really wonder how this passed ethical review. Yes the brain is an organ, and yes there’s probably consent and the body is officially proclaimed dead and this is near the best way to really extrapolate the empirical data prior to alive human trials.
But damn this article is a combination of words I did not want to read today nor imagine.
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.
Keep that in mind when they make arguments about propofol... Which is one of the drugs mentioned in https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/12/surgical-... and https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/neuroscience/pain/anesthesi...
https://web.archive.org/web/20120411063647/http://squid314.l...
"What did the doctor say? He told me that they couldn’t up the anesthetic because an overdose could cause respiratory arrest, and that it wouldn’t matter because the anaesthetic on any dose caused severe short term memory loss and whatever happened the patient would forget all about it. The second point, at least, was right on. One patient spent the entire procedure writhing in agony and screaming something incoherent to God. The doctor finished the procedure, took out the endoscope, and cut off the anesthetic, and the patient turned his head, looked the doctor right in the eye, smiled, and said, laughing “Wow, that wasn’t bad at all! Guess I slept right through it!”"
[1]: e.g. https://doi.org/10.4161/psb.27886
Is that incorrect?
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.
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.
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
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.
> Modern physics, in other words, provides evidence for what philosophers call “causal closure of the physical”: physical events have purely physical causes (Loewer 1995, Papineau 1995), at least in the regime relevant to human life. Without dramatically upending our understanding of quantum field theory, there is no room for any new influences that could bear on the problem of consciousness.
https://philpapers.org/archive/CARCAT-33
I don't see how this relates to the "seat of consciousness" (with)in a human body, or how the biological system works together to "form it". Or where thinking or memory storage or retrieval takes place. At least that was what I was talking about. You're talking about something else.
It is a theory that we think in the brain. As far as I understand it, and please prove me wrong, there are other, valid theories? It's unscientific to discard theories purely based on belief. You seem to be arguing from a certain belief, not from science.
The modern term for "soul" is "psyche".
Remember that the OP was asking: "How do you ensure that you aren’t torturing a brain that can’t see, hear or scream?" -- clearly refering to something... conscious?
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.
No it's not, not by anyone serious.
We know the brain is the seat of consciousness because damage to the brain damages consciousness. There is no other organ in the body where that's true. You can completely replace all other organs without changing consciousness.
You can always find a paper by a quack that posits the earth is flat, that doesn't mean there's serious debate.
I am familiar with the works of Oliver Sacks, Paul Broks, and others, who have spent their lives researching damage to brains and the potential consequences for the psyche. I agree that it sounds like damage to the brain can have big impact, but none of that research, as far as I am aware, proves or even tries to argue that the brain is the only component necessary for consciousness to exist.
I am not interested in beliefs in one theory over another. I am not even asking for probabilities. I am asking for a scientific approach, which is to detail all possible (potentially fringe) theories until they're proven wrong. Anything else is the business of religion.
We think that organs can be replaced with little apparent change in consciousness (- this is an active research area, too, by the way). There is also research into how body tissues may form a part of what other theories place exclusively in the brain. > "Having its own enteric nervous system, sometimes referred to as the “second brain,” the gut is also an immune organ and has a large surface area interacting with gut microbiota. The gut has been shown to play an important role in many physiological processes, and may arguably do so as well in perception and cognition."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.
Until you hook it up to a lightening rod in the top of a castle!
Can’t be worse than my organs being harvested for donation.
I think for direct comparison, the way of re-animating the brain described in the article would need to be attempted on the cardiac arrest patient as well so as to be sure it isn’t a “revival”-capable method
Might already be an obvious answer to practitioners in the field
I think that's the part that might get people though. Since a comatose brain is not necessarily fully gone
So I guess the question is what differentiates a comatose brain from one that is no longer capable of consciousness?
Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7 Activity recorded M.Y. 2302.22467 (TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED)
> 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.
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.
I would say accidentally mistaking the patient is dead in any case is hardly the same as purposefully harvesting the organs from people they know are alive to get paid. The article does not state any evidence to suggest they are doing this.
There is obviously going to be some pressure to make a decision to retrieve the organs in the interest of not wasting something that could save another's life as there is a limited time frame where these organs can be viable. There is a huge distinction between that and going to patients that have no doubt they are alive and harvesting their organs.
Unless you live in some incredibly lawless country?
Organ donation is so very sensitive, and those who use the service are so aware of the sensitivities I think that you'd be insane to have such a reaction to this media piece.
In fact, I'll go one further. I have serious doubts you were ever an organ donor at all.
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".
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.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052646/mediaviewer/rm713036545...
Just please don't remove my brain before I'm 1000% certainly dead.
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.
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.
I hope this is a comforting answer, I choose to be an organ donor because of these details.
It's not the same as what you suggest, but there's still hope you could regain consciousness, and this is a process that some companies already have infrastructure for. It is pretty expensive though.
And who am I to judge? Maybe that is the reality.
Indeed, that is (allegedly) the case with organ donation: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/us/organ-transplants-dono...
It seems that the likelihood is high that the right animal model would yield superior data???
Does this mean the donor was (1) or can the "revive" after (2)?
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...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you could only rescue one member from some kind of deadly emergency and they had equal chances, would you prioritize the pet over a human member of your family?
> If you could only rescue one member from some kind of deadly emergency and they had equal chances, would you prioritize the pet over a human member of your family?
If you could only rescue one family member from some kind of deadly emergency and they had equal chances, would you prioritize a stranger over a member of your family?
I'll preface by saying that I don't have a pet. However, if one had to burn alive between a stranger's little girl and my cat, it's easier to empathize, "what if that were my daughter?". It's easy to imagine the father's pain, and because the girl is human, it's easier to imagine what might be going on in the little girl's head as well. As the heat's becoming too strong for her to bear, it's easier to imagine her expression, her pain, and her fear.
It's harder to imagine and empathize with what might be going on through a cat's head. They don't think as we do and don't express themselves as we do. It's not like one can't anthropomorphize and empathize that way, but it's not the same as empathizing with a human. It's harder to imagine and feel their thoughts and emotions to the same level of detail.
I'd feel for the cat, but I think the girl burning alive would give me the worse nightmares.
A more straightforward angle could be money spent: would someone spend more for the wellbeing of their pet than for a family member (elderlies included).
Hell, if I had to choose between MY cat and YOUR daughter, the choice would will be easy
Torture - the infliction of intense pain (as from burning, crushing, or wounding) to punish, coerce, or afford sadistic pleasure.
I’m still on the acceptance side of abortion, stem cell research and other things like human cloning. They advance science, reduce human suffering - yes I get abortion doesn’t fit there exactly but it should be the mothers/parents right to ave access to abortion. All very political and highly debatable points today.
I understand if I accept that, what’s accepting experimentation on a brain dead brain - it should be a no brainer.
Easier because it’s just an artifact of a person that’s deceased but it is easy to invoke imagery in my own brain of an eternal torture chamber, someone’s consciousness locked away never recoverable or removable undergoing this amount of pain, but also is it pain if it can’t feel it?
The bodies other organs, it’s easy to dismiss as collections of cells, etc but: the brain just makes it harder to justify because it is the organ we use to interpret the world and imagining a world of pain and wondering what if that is the layer we are in now… is just scary.