Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

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We have had successful cryonic restoration of brain tissue in rabbits? I believe, and have also had successful brain transplants of mice.

I easily figure in the next 100 years we will accept cloning as a replacement for death. Simply duplicate the body, and transfer the brain, maybe throw in some extra gray matter to replenish what is lost through aging. Of course "throw in some extra gray matter" sells the complexity a bit short, but we are definitely on track to accomplish it.

I anticipate never having a 130 year old body. I would just replace mine with a genetically enhanced one at 60, and start over from ~15 (or honestly whatever the earliest age to insert a brain is). Almost anyone should be able to raise the money in ~30 years to pay to have another clone grown.

And from there you can iterate a few generations on first generation tech until we can manipulate the living brain into being able to learn like you are five again, hopefully without the negative side effects present in current brains of that capacity.

> in the next 100 years we will accept cloning as a replacement for death. Simply duplicate the body, and transfer the brain

Cloning isn't the same thing as "Simply duplicat[ing] the body."

Cloning creates an embryo which turns into a human infant. Then you have to wait 18 years for it to mature before you can transfer the brain.

There's an insurmountable moral barrier to raising a fully conscious child to adulthood and then killing it so you can have its body.

Some commenters down-thread have suggested removing the infant's brain and raising it, without consciousness, in a vat of some sort.

Aside from the obvious difficulty and huge expense of maintaining a fantastical life-supporting "vat" for 18 years, it just simply wouldn't work.

Human beings require social interaction, and consciousness, to survive. An infant deprived of social interaction and environmental stimulation, and the consciousness to experience it obviously, would die. Animals also require physical interaction; our bones and muscles and senses can't develop properly in a vat, so you'd end up with, at best, a pathetic excuse for a body, totally unable to function in any way you'd enjoy, if your clone survived at all (which it wouldn't).

In short, this idea is both morally appalling and biologically ridiculous.

The human body does not literally require social interaction to continue operating. That's just silly.

There are also ways to maintain muscles without normal exercise. Direct electro-stimulation is an easy approach.

There is no physical reason you couldn't grow a body without a brain. It's an engineering challenge.

>The human body does not literally require social interaction to continue operating. That's just silly.

I wasn't talking about you. I was talking about whether a human infant missing most of its brain and deprived of all social interaction, environmental stimulation, and physical activity would thrive and mature normally. It would not.

(Also, just for the record, there are things which aren't possible to do, no matter how many awesome engineers you have.)

Obviously a body with no brain wouldn't do great. That's why you put the a brain in before you start using the body.

>(Also, just for the record, there are things which aren't possible to do, no matter how many awesome engineers you have.)

Yes, like break the laws of physics. Nothing proposed here does that.

I can't imagine why you would need a cloned body. With the level of technology needed to make that work, you should just be able to rejuvenate the one you already have. The body is already self-repairing, the problem is that the aging process makes this mechanism faulty. That can be fixed. If your cells can easily grow and multiply from a zygote into a mature adult, there's no reason you can't fix the flaws which prevent total rejuvenation. It might require nanites though. But that still sounds easier than a brain transplant and then manipulating the brain to learn like a 5yo again.

The later is surely science fiction, but brain transplants - which really, are just figuring out how to perfectly reconnect spinal tissue, which while incredibly hard is not something completely fictional since we have already done it in very reduced test cases (and we know that stem cells are likely going go give us an easy way eventually to just regrow the gaps in the spinal column) are not nearly as far out as nanites of the sophistication to modify organic cells are right now.

What about the ethical issue of clones? Will clones be raised in vats without ever achieving consciousness?

If you have to raise your clone by yourself as another human being, who's to say which one of you deserves to keep living?

It all sounds so very nice in theory, but the reality might be that only the very rich and the elite will be able to afford to undergo such procedures, mainly because of the secrecy needed to essentially grow sacrificial human beings to maturity.

Well, preferably you wouldn't be growing conscious clones. Ideally, you'd sabotage the brain's development so as to prevent consciousness from developing in the first place (keep the hindbrain, chuck the rest so to speak) or come up with a way to artificially control vital functions.

But don't worry. There are lots of other ethical concerns to focus on after you get rid of the conscious clone problem.

"Well, preferably you wouldn't be growing conscious clones. Ideally, you'd sabotage the brain's development so as to prevent consciousness from developing in the first place"

Arguably, if you're at that level of sophisticated biological manipulation, you're probably better-off simply growing the organs/replacement-parts/cells by themselves.

Affording rejuvenation would be paid for by your pension, because you wouldn't need that anymore.

Read the Commonwealth Saga by Peter F Hamilton

How does this affect overpopulation?

Read a SF novel recently [0] where the rejuvenation treatment that you take periodically to extend your life indefinitely also makes you sterile temporarily. If you chose to have children (which is socially frowned upon), you must stop taking the treatment forever.

Not sure that we would be able to implement such a rationale solution, but at least it was pretty logical. The novel is essentially about the other grim decisions you have to take to have a constant population.

[0] This was in a book with multiple short stories from Paolo Bacigalupi. I believe this is Pump Six and Other Stories. Most of the novel are rather pessimistic, but at the same times sounds plausible enough to happen. I also recommend The Wind Up Girl from the same author.

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