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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.
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."
There’s no such thing as live dissection. It’s vivisection.
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
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.
Is that incorrect?
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.
Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7 Activity recorded M.Y. 2302.22467 (TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED)
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.
> 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.
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".
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052646/mediaviewer/rm713036545...
It seems that the likelihood is high that the right animal model would yield superior data???
Just please don't remove my brain before I'm 1000% certainly dead.
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.
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 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...
Dramatized retelling of the story at 21m04s: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ny_s07D-LT8&t=1264s
[1]: e.g. https://doi.org/10.4161/psb.27886
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.
And on top of that, they put a sedative, just in case.
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.
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.
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.
It just invokes a strong emotional response because it's so "abnormal", but if you think about it, there is so much more pain going on where no one bats an eye.
Perfectly avoidable pain even. So it's not even that aspect.
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OTOH, this is HN, I guess. Having empathy for real people would be harmful to the business model of most people's employers.
So instead, mostly performative outrage/empathy with something that is effectively dead can fill in that gap.
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.
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...
At the very least drop an "allegedly" or something to make it sound a little tasteful.
How is it obvious pedophilia, if you say he may have never done a sexual thing to them?
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.
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.