Device keeps brain alive, functioning separate from body
utsouthwestern.edu
utsouthwestern.edu
Ethics declarations:
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
I'm surprised this work got approval from the Institutional Animal Care & Use Committee.
https://olaw.nih.gov/resources/tutorials/iacufoot.htm
Criteria for IACUC Review and Approval of Protocols:
...
d. The living conditions of animals will be appropriate for their species and contribute to their health and comfort. ...
This was exactly my wondering, as well. It sounds like a really interesting sci-fi horror novel concept to be kept conscious as a brain but unable to interact with the world at all. The idea of being kept alive indefinitely in that state sounds like a fate worse than death.
Also has me wondering: what kind of consciousness is even theoretically possible for a human brain without a body?
Perhaps this a way to offer some life extension for the terminally ill.
Sadly, I never bought a copy, but thanks to the internet I can now read the patent. https://patents.google.com/patent/US4666425A/en
I have not read the book, but my understanding is that the book is largely a discussion of the ethics of such a procedure. I'd love to read it someday. If anyone comes across a PDF copy of the original book, please let me know!
“Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Anyway, brains in jars are still meat. They're still cells which succumb to the steady accumulation of errors and cellular junk. Brains in a jar may be easier than keeping a full body alive, but I suspect only slightly.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat
Or I just read:
Therefore the logical end of mechanical progress is to reduce the human being to something resembling a brain in a bottle.
This seems like being somewhere in the same broad category of problem.
If we are a virtualized universe, they definitely would be!
It struck me, when pondering what it would mean for something like a LLM to have an identity, that this identity as a single path notion will have to be replaced with identity as something capable of branching of into different paths.
Some interpretations of quantum mechanics also points towards such a notion of identity, even if just a philosophical notion
In a sense most of us already identify as a composite of past selves all embedded into our current self, preparing for our future selves. Why is another copy, or branch, going to cause an identity crisis?
Our comments therefore cancel out.
(Our of curiosity, the people you talked to - were they elderly, in failing bodies, with failing minds, seeing nothing in their personal future but slow and steady degradation? Might they think differently if their quality of life could be improved?)
Let's say I have a 500 year lifespan, all except the last 10 or so with health and vigor.
Well at that point, the opportunity cost of skill mastery becomes tiny. Spend 20 years learning to become a really great piano player, and another 15 learning parkour. Master 3 or 4 martial arts, that is a good 20-30 years each. Homestead for a decade or two, doing everything from scratch by hand. Spend a couple decades doing volunteer work.
1 minute of ideas and I'm up to 150 years so far.
I agree that need to achieve a post-scarcity society, which would involve a lot of uncomfortable trade-offs. E.g. if we just have food that we can 100% automate the production of and that doesn't cause any ecological harm, we'd dramatically limit what food exists for human consumption. Same goes for transit, consumer goods, and so forth. I honestly think that if humanity wanted to, we could transition to post scarcity in a few decades using today's technology, but it would be a drop in quality of life for the first world (no more steaks!) so there is no real motive by those with power and money.
It is a matter of perspective. I find daily joy in movement and motion. There are thousands of foods I have yet to try, innumerable combinations of spices I have yet to experience. Heck, a very large number of flower varities I haven't smelled!
If you get up every morning and hate eat your breakfast, your day will be off to a terrible start. If you get up and look forward to the new type of sausage you got from the farmers market over the weekend, then life is pretty grand!
Sure there are sensory inputs I'd miss. But as long as IO in the form of text and/or audio is working, with or without augmentation, I'm confident it would be worth a try. Vision would be a nice to have.
"No please don't!" Said the brain nobody was listening to anymore...
I'd also cede things like property rights in exchange for long term care. People do this today! But a BIV's needs would be simpler than full body care. All I'd need would be physical protection, temperature control, food, and a network connection. :)
Putting off your opportunity to make that insight by fantasizing about immortality and indefinite life extension mostly just makes your life more difficult and stressful.
Personally I'd be interested in seeing what sort of insights I could come up with over the course of a couple thousand years.
The word "fantasize" especially is bizarre - we're discussing a premise (arbitrarily extended life), and you're using a word that escapes the premise (a synonym for "it's not real").
As a premise, it might not be psychologically good for people if it was real.
There is no warmth without cold; there is no life without death.
But I would sign up to be a brain in a vat as long as I could read and write. Someday, Fyodor, someday.
>There's a finite amount of ... experiences
I very much doubt that is the case in anything but the most pedantic, philosophical sense.
There are tons of ethical questions that need answered, but human potential has no limits.
This is a power our ancestor could barely dream of. Attributed to an all-knowing power. And now, to some degree, we have power over it. We can write medical text on it on it in a scientific way.
We’re a cool af species.