EXCERPT: Researchers in the US say they have managed to keep the brains of decapitated pigs alive outside of the body for up to 36 hours by circulating an oxygen-rich fluid through the organs. [...] Nenad Sestan and his colleagues are reported to have used more than 100 pigs, whose brains were recovered from slaughterhouses. [...] the research was unlikely to be replicated in humans, [...dismissing...] the idea that body transplants were on the cards.
[...] “That animal brain is not aware of anything, I am very confident of that,” Sestan is reported to have told the NIH meeting. But he noted that ethical considerations abound: “Hypothetically, somebody takes this technology, makes it better, and restores someone’s [brain] activity. That is restoring a human being. If that person has memory, I would be freaking out completely.”
Frances Edwards, professor of neurodegeneration at University College London, told the Guardian the development could prove useful to researchers. “It could be useful for studying connections between cells and at some level working out the network interactions in a large brain,” she said. “There would be some advantages for imaging and certainly for developing imaging techniques.”
I am reminded of a horror story where a family of cannibals would strap their victim to a table and eat them alive. Even the writer of that story didn't go so far as to suggest keeping the brain of the victim alive after the body (and eyes) had been consumed. No matter what the value of the research I don't regard this as remotely acceptable. I don't think we have any right whatsoever to define any other race or species as being so inferior to us that we can pretend any and all research is 'justified'.
Researchers display extreme version of playing with your food
Watched nature doc, hyena sneaks up on gazelle, grabs hold of neck, gazelle breaks leg during struggle, other hyenas arrive, gazelle taken down, first hyena still holds, others rip gazelle body open as it still struggles, hyenas begin to consume prey while its still alive, eventually it dies, not much left for the vultures within an hour.
Moral of story?: Anything hyenas can do, we can do better?
The idea is that someday in the future scientists will scan your bricked brain and turn it into a computer simulation. That way, someone a lot like you, though not exactly you, will smell the flowers again in a data server somewhere.
This story has a grisly twist, though. For Nectome’s procedure to work, it’s essential that the brain be fresh. The company says its plan is to connect people with terminal illnesses to a heart-lung machine in order to pump its mix of scientific embalming chemicals into the big carotid arteries in their necks while they are still alive (though under general anesthesia).
The company has consulted with lawyers familiar with California’s two-year-old End of Life Option Act, which permits doctor-assisted suicide for terminal patients, and believes its service will be legal.
[…]
Some scientists say brain storage and reanimation is an essentially fraudulent proposition. Writing in our pages in 2015, the McGill University neuroscientist Michael Hendricks decried the “abjectly false hope” peddled by transhumanists promising resurrection in ways that technology can probably never deliver.
"Burdening future generations with our brain banks is just comically arrogant. Aren’t we leaving them with enough problems?" Hendricks told me this week after reviewing Nectome’s website. "I hope future people are appalled that in the 21st century, the richest and most comfortable people in history spent their money and resources trying to live forever on the backs of their descendants. I mean, it’s a joke, right? They are cartoon bad guys."
And I saw the dead, small and great; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is [the book] of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
Can you just imagine?
"Hey Siri, find me someone to read. I don’t know. Something raunchy."
And I saw the dead, small and great; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is [the book] of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.
Can you just imagine?
"Hey Siri, find me someone to read. I don’t know. Something raunchy."
After decades of unrivaled reign, commercial cryogenics finally has a competitor in its quasi-scam country.
But there's also that softer version of digital immortality which builds-up an account of a person's personality, behavior, interests, memories, etc without brain reading. Obviously that would be a far less accurate restoration. More of a virtual assistant or chatbot for one's descendants to converse with rather than necessarily a resurrection and afterlife from a first-person or subjective POV.
Would definitely be of interest to any lingering ancestor veneration slash consultation in Asia, with the spirit tablet of traditional Chinese culture being replaced by a chatbot avatar. "I need your wisdom for dealing with a problem I have, oh noble great-grandmother."
Simon Parkin: . . . San Franciscan Aaron Sunshine’s grandmother also passed away recently. “One thing that struck me is how little of her is left,” the 30-year-old tells me. “It’s just a few possessions. I have an old shirt of hers that I wear around the house. There's her property but that's just faceless money. It has no more personality than any other dollar bill.” Her death inspired Sunshine to sign up with Eterni.me, a web service that seeks to ensure that a person’s memories are preserved after their death online.
It works like this: while you’re alive you grant the service access to your Facebook, Twitter and email accounts, upload photos, geo-location history and even Google Glass recordings of things that you have seen. The data is collected, filtered and analysed before it’s transferred to an AI avatar that tries to emulate your looks and personality. The avatar learns more about you as you interact with it while you’re alive, with the aim of more closely reflecting you as time progresses.
“It’s about creating an interactive legacy, a way to avoid being totally forgotten in the future,” says Marius Ursache, one of Eterni.me’s co-creators. “Your grand-grand-children will use it instead of a search engine or timeline to access information about you – from photos of family events to your thoughts on certain topics to songs you wrote but never published.” For Sunshine, the idea that he might be able to interact with a legacy avatar of his grandmother that reflected her personality and values is comforting. “I dreamt about her last night,” he says. “Right now a dream is the only way I can talk to her. But what if there was a simulation? She would somehow be less gone from my life.”http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150122...mmortality
EXCERPT: A team of scientists led by Nenad Sestan (Yale) have “restored circulation to the brains of decapitated pigs and kept the reanimated organs alive for as long as 36 hours,” reports MIT Technology Review. The method used to keep pigs’ brains alive outside the body will work on other animals, including primates, Sestan said. The following is a guest post* by Carolyn Dicey Jennings, assistant professor of philosophy and cognitive science at UC Merced, in which she discusses some of the philosophical issues arising from this research....
Apr 28, 2018 09:28 PM
(This post was last modified: Apr 28, 2018 09:39 PM by C C.)
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