Pig brains kept alive outside bodies for first time
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
I'm curious how they were able to verify this. I am under the (perhaps incorrect?) impression that consciousness is neither well defined nor a binary function.
I assume, given what they say in the article, that the pig brain activity in the experiment was somewhere close to the activity of a dead brain or a brain in a coma.
They also explained that the blood-replacement they used contain a lot of inhibitive substances probably preventing the brains from being active even if they could.
> After initially shocking results indicating the brains were partially conscious – which later turned out to be mistaken – the scientists concluded they were producing a flat brain wave comparable with someone in a comatose state.
> “That animal brain is not aware of anything, I am very confident of that,” said Dr Sestan.
I mean what does a brain do with absolutely no external stimulus at all?
the tl;dr is that a healthy brain produces a significant amount of activity, even absent of sensory stimulation.
https://www.quora.com/What-happens-in-the-brain-during-senso...
This is fascinating research.
I'd imagine its pretty hard to be certain that a brain-dead person can't perceive his or her surroundings, however.
Consider how we can feel physical sensations in dreams without any physical source, or “phantom limbs” that amputees are sometimes said to feel.
Could you find a link perhaps? I Googled the end of what I just quoted but didn't find anything...
The Sibyl System is made up of networked human brains giving tremendous computation ability.
Would not surprise me that the answer on what's beyond silicon is actual living brain tissue being the CPU.
The setup is that the brains come from people that "broke" the system, and are wired up to look for others that match their kind.
They are effectively there much like Neo and Zion are to the Matrix, a way to rebalance the system over time.
It's possible to build compact neuromorphic devices using spintronics... Denser and more energy efficient.
Is it just that the technology smells like scary sci-fi stuff?
The other would be intentional harm. Imagining the technology developing into the hopefully-far future, it's fair to also imagine interest from organizations like the CIA, who are so very fond of finding new ways to cruelly torture people while pretending they get good intelligence from it.
As for the CIA, MKULTRA? Bay of Pigs? Drug trafficking? You seem to imply a simple ethical boundary would stop them. I don't see much historical basis for believing that.
If this technology is developed further and eventually becomes available to more than a tiny number of people, I don't think we can guess what the positive or negative effects on society will be.
We never can; we live in a surveillance state, but it doesn't look like Orwell's 1984. We have advanced technology that the dreamers of the 1950s never foresaw, but no jetpacks or flying cars -- just miniaturized, globally-connected pocket computers designed to capture as much attention as possible. The global climate has continued to worsen since alarms were broadly sounded in the 1980s, but most of us that have the luxury of discussing the topic are sitting in nice little homes and offices and blissfully untouched by it all. We have high-tech network-connected systems and a mix of severely concentrated wealth and a much larger impoverished group, but none of this looks like cyberpunk genre fiction.
Bad futures tend to happen gently enough for them to seem perfectly acceptable. A lot of people even come to defend them.
What do pre-crime do to someone they grabbed for what they were supposed to do if pre-crime didn't intervene? Put them in a stasis tank while they get to watch their supposed future crime on repeat.
What would even be the goal of such a prison?
Keeping a brain alive outside the body might be have the problem that it in constant pain and unable to act in the world in any meaningful way. What more terrifying experience could imagine than being aware and utterly "disembodied"?
But then again, it might have the implication that the brain might installed in a new body with the slight problem that existing brain is evicted. Sure, some healthy bodies with dysfunctional brains can be found but that's only a short term problem.
Nothing that hasn't covered by the scariest horror movies you can think of. The movie "get out" occurs to me - old people parasitizing younger bodies, rich people parasitizing poorer bodies, etc.
This is how many factory farmed animals already live.
Where is the outrage?
Now contemplate consciousness with no sensory input at all (not even your own heartbeat or normal bodily sensations when you move, etc.) leaving only whatever phantom sensation the traumatized nerves generate, like amputees' phantom limbs and phantom pain, but for your only sensation.
On an individual basis this may be the most terrifying thing I could ever imagine.
None of this is certain, but I think little of this is very controversial.
Well, not yet, anyway.
Of course, every person's experience could be unique and different.
It seems to me like the ethical framework surrounding this depends rather a lot on the outcome of these experiments. We have no idea what a disembodied consciousness experiences. Nor do we know what, if anything, they would express. To me, the answers to these questions determine the ethics of this to a very large degree.
One might argue that the possibilities are so horrible that we should not proceed. And yet I cannot help but be curious.
Try sensory deprivation (or isolation) tanks, or just solitary confinement. Both and especially the latter obviously are just a tiny fraction as bad. You don't spend much time in a tank, and the solitary confinement still leaves you with your senses. But already getting too much of either is pretty bad.
As an exercise for yourself: Just sit completely still in a completely quiet and dark room for as long as you can (try the cellar).
OK, maybe not pig brains. Maybe dog brains. Dogs are pack animals, and quite trainable.
Remember the watchdogs in Cryptonomicon :)
PETA would not be happy, however.
Edit: No, that was Snow Crash. How embarrassing :(
Also, allegedly, China experiments on humans. Human rights organizations probably wouldn't be happy to see the resulting scientific papers.
In Hannu Rajaniemi's Flower Prince trilogy, he posits that the minds of billions of people will get uploaded, and that all but a few rich ones will end up as slaves. Basically apps.
Warning that the film does show a decapitated dog being artificially kept alive through a bypass device. A much different era.
Consider, say, the space race. They have a clear motivation to demonstrate superiority close to this era. I have also gotten the impression that the classic soviet government didn't exactly have a reputation for sterling honesty, and this doesn't seem wildly far afield from something you could achieve with practical effects.
I have limited specialist domain knowledge, but the head doesn't really have a power source. Blood can give the brain oxygen, but hours seems a bit far-fetched. They definitely skip a lot of detail here, like where/how they oxygenate the blood without lungs. The head has the brain, which takes a lot of energy to run for its size, and probably doesn't carry out the metabolic processes of energy production, with the blood/brain barrier. So, you have a big power draw, and no engine. Hours of observable or verifiable life seems like a lot for stale blood with no power source and a big power draw.
I also don't know the authentic history of the video to verify it didn't come as a complete fabrication of a historical curiosity at a later date.
I would like to see credible verification, but it doesn't really add up.
The scientist in the beginning of the film is the famous physiologist Haldane, which is why I originally believed the video. However your response led me to find out he was a Marxist! Now I was torn and had doubts.
Turns out that while the film was propaganda aimed toward Western Scientists, it was real and did work.
http://perfusiontheory.com/who-really-invented-the-heartlung...
You say that as if you just found out he was a member of ISIS and killed women and children by burning them alive. I can't find anything in Karl Marx' teachings that could cause such a response, even when you disagree with him completely.
I've seen nothing about it since then. I like to imagine the scientists are working on Terminators for DARPA.
Edit: guess I should've read the link in the other reply. :)
As opposed to if we experiment on some dead persons liver, if we experiment on his revived brain we might actually be experimenting on a conscious being (human), is what I believe is the main thing here.
Vegans have this bizarre tendency of reducing human ethics to a bunch of incorrect generalizations (i.e. a dog is sort of like a cow, therefore it's "odd" that people eat cows but consider it wrong to eat dogs), and are then baffled that the world doesn't follow their artificial ethical formalism.
Why is it artificial?
Very curious about your reasoning?
Keep in mind that the whole reason pigs were used for this experiment is because they are biologically similar to humans.
The same could be said for almost anything we do with pigs
To me there is a huge difference between killing animals for food and conducting ethically questionable experiments on them. Another bothersome element here is that pigs are super smart and even though they state they are sure the pig(s) never regained consciousness you have to wonder what kind of extreme stress they would have cause if that had not worked out.
Animal research is something that I hope we can do without in the near future. And if we all ate less meat (or none at all) then that would be for the better as well, though ironically that would likely mean that there would be no more domesticated animals kept for food at all except for cows (for milk) and chickens (for eggs).
> Brains rescued from a slaughterhouse had their circulation restored with a system of pumps, heaters and artificial blood.
As you say, they are inextricably linked on the large scale. At least for eggs though, you can definitely patronize small farms that don’t need to employ such aggressive economies of scale.
Until they smell blood. If you ever go into a pig pen and cut yourself the pigs will attack you and probably kill you. Chickens are similar but of course being smaller they attack each other.
People these days more than ever want to anthropomorphize animals they like. But when instinct kicks in many of those animals are, well, just animals.
No one would complain about that. /s
I live in a rural area with lots of farming. A few people I know come from families that raise pigs and no they do not torture them. Even to the point of having a controlled access entry to the barn to prevent disease coming in from the outside (disinfectant tray for shoes).
It's hard work to maintain and raise animals for food farmers aren't going to spend time and effort torturing pigs which are their income. No business person is going to damage their product for kicks. A wheat farmer doesn't drive over his crop and flatten it. Fishermen don't throw dynamite into the water for fun.
At minimum pigs are castrated, transported and imprisoned against their will, and slaughtered against their will. Small, independent or family farmers do take care to minimize suffering. Minimize, not eliminate.
That's not at all the case at industrial farms. Sows are raised and slaughtered in dismal conditions. Gestation crates, forced and early weaning, artificial insemination, etc. Sows raised for slaughter can experience physical abuse, sexual abuse, and psychological abuse in a number of ways.
It's the same as saying that what was happening at Guantanamo bay was no worse than what was happening elsewhere so why all the fuss?
An animal doesn't know if it is being raised for experimentation or food. They are simply being treated cruelly until they are slaughtered. They may even be leading a better life if they are being raised for experimentation than for slaughter. We on the other hand are trying to wipe our conscious clean by rationalizing the reasons behind the slaughter and putting food over knowledge. We don't need to eat meat to survive or thrive, so saying "but it is for food" holds no higher a moral ground than "but it is for an experiment".
And that's the concern, here; torture.
Also damage to the brain has immediate and profound effects on one's mental capabilities as opposed to damage to any other organ.
Where is the mind then according to these theories?
Hmm why? No spoiler? I wouldn’t mind sharing it right away.