The article does mention that, but I don't think simply defining the base of the transplant as the section with the most mass accurately describes the situation. What part of the body defines a person's identity? Is it the head, or the rest of the body? I can see a case where the brain is considered the center of mass (from an operation standpoint).
Can it be defined as what is being replaced and discarded? When you have a heart transplant, they replace the heart with a new one and discard the old heart. In this case, they're discarding the body, so I see it as a body transplant. As others have noted, mass is meaningless in this context.
Edit: The sources on wikipedia's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplant article all call it a head transplant... so, I assume people more knowledgeable than I on the topic have already "talked it out". Head transplant it is!
I like that; and I like defining it as what part goes with the self. Your definition is probably cleaner but I think most of us feel like the "I" goes with the head no matter what else may change.
That's exactly my view as well. You don't have a "body minus liver" transplant, you have a liver transplant (i.e. you get a new liver). Here, you get a new body, not a new head, therefore body transplant.
Doesn't it come down to what can be exchanged and retain jwn?
jwn's head on a different body may be taller and slimmer, but the personality remains. It should, in essence, still be "you". Vice versa and we get a completely different person but with about your height and build.
So on that basis I think I prefer to think of body transplant to head transplant.
...maybe. I think we underrate the physicality of our minds. For example, if you transplanted a male head on a female body or vice versa, some personality changes would be expected. Or a male head on a male body with different testosterone levels, for example.
While I agree with you agree with your general argument from an abstract and pedantic point of view, OTOH, I think "head transplant" is a lot cleaner and more convenient to use than "all-of-the-body-except-the-head transplant", without any loss of clarity in practical communication.
At some point, you have to accept that language is meant to be used, and that's more important than being abstractly consistent.
(Technically, the surgery would be a body transplant, since the acquisition of a new body is what saves the patient’s life. Then again, the head makes up less than 10 percent of our body weight. Can you really “transplant” the heavier, majority part? And if rejection occurs, it will be the body rejecting the head, not vice versa.)
This reminds me of an old joke: The doctor has a patient come in, and is startled to realise he has a live frog sticking out of his forehead. "Good lord, how did you end up with that?" the doctor asks. "Well, it started as a zit on my ass," replies the frog.
I've read that the transplant can be defined through what part has to be kept alive during the procedure. So when you're transplanting a heart, there is a brief period where the heart is without a body to support it - ergo heart transplant.
The head is part of the body, so, no; "All-of-the-body-except-the-head" would be accurate, but overly cumbersome. Given that people know that the seat of identity is in the head, "head transplant" fairly obviously in practical use means "all-of-the-body-except-the-head transplant", but is a lot easier to say.
Going completely off topic, but when I heard the title, the initial picture I saw, was a body, with a failing head, being saved by the addition of functional head from the recently deceased.
After a few seconds, I remembered "the seat of identity is in the head" and I corrected the image. Anyway, for all of us reading the news before our morning coffee kicks in, I have to say that "body transplant" would more quickly convey what's actually happening.
Reading all those different, excruciatingly difficult surgical steps it sounds like it would be just about easier to give him a robot body, Futurama-Nixon style.
The head transplant boils down to 3 problems: microsurgery, nerve regeneration and immunotherapy. Each of which is incredibly complicated, but the understanding is there to do things like full hand transplants (they don't restore full function, but the doctors apparently believe them to be useful enough to be ethical).
We have no idea how to artificially provide all the functions that the body carries out. We have some baby steps like dialysis, but how would the life support system deal with infections? Or take a look at the problems that various heart assist systems have with clotting and coagulation (blood likes to stick to the artificial surfaces).
"the doctors apparently believe them to be useful enough to be ethical"
I don't think ethics works that way. Just because something is very useful doesn't necessarily mean that it's ethical.
Nuclear weapons are a case in point. Few will deny that they're very useful and effective weapons, but many believe their use to be unethical, no matter how useful they are.
Chemical and biological weapons, and cluster bombs are other similar examples.
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. Are you saying that usefulness trumps ethics in medicine but not in warfare? If so, why do you think that?
Of course it doesn't "trump ethics." In the context of a hand transplant, the likelihood of the procedure resulting in a useful hand is a large part of deciding whether or not it's ethical. The likelihood of improved quality of life is weighed against the likelihood of pain and complications.
My meaning was that hand transplants would (probably) be unethical if the result provided no function. The technique is good enough that the benefits outweigh the costs.
Obviously they must also consider the other aspects of it ethical.
> "the doctors apparently believe them to be useful enough to be ethical"
> I don't think ethics works that way.
I'm pretty sure that they do.
> Just because something is very useful doesn't necessarily mean that it's ethical.
OTOH, for lots of things (and surgical operations with inherent risks are pretty solidly on this list) utility is certainly relevant to (and a certain level, a prerequisite for) an action to be ethical, even if it is not sufficient alone to determine that the action is ethical.
> We need our bodies and our internal organs to live
Implies you can live without body? Neither mind, nor consciousness is live, that's why you literally don't live if you don't have body. There's no philosophical dilemma here - life must be able to replicate. Mind can't replicate. It's not alive.
> 2. We must eat to survive
Literally. A physical body, which is the only way to be alive, needs physical atoms to exist, and acquisition of the building blocks is called eating.
> 3. We must die
Only point I can semi-agree with. Life span can be reasonably extended. No immortality though.
Assuming that we continue to require resources, then #4 will continue to be true.
Granted: as technology improves, we need to work a lot less to achieve the same quality of life.
But there's still a requirement to produce those resources; it is incumbent upon someone to work to produce them, be it a farm labourer or an engineer designing farm robots.
I think it's not really interesting if you disagree with an article simply by using a different understanding of the same words.
1. "Body" in the paragraph means "the rest of the body, excluding the brain". It is not used to mean, "the entire body, including the brain".
2. This is incorrect. The acquisition of matter is not always called eating. I'm not talking about drinking—we can group that with eating—but there are alternative ways to acquire nutrients and there are also other ways to acquire matter that do not involve nutrients. Having a nutrient IV would not involve eating, and if you got a good source of nutrients this way, it would bypass many of the biological problems involving nutrient absorption through the GI tract. Problems with nutrient absorption in the GI tract account for a worrying number of health problems in older individuals. (You can also attach matter to your body with surgery.)
How is the brain not a body? Brain is certainly not mind, neither consciousness. Why not replace it too then? Is it because he has enough imagination to think replacing heart is possible, but replacing brain isn't without losing consciousness?
As for eating, he clearly stated what he meant - power brain through electricity. Shows complete lack of basic understanding of body functions, of which brain is part of. He believes that brain is powered by electricity. Good example of this whole article - fantasy without any deeper thoughts of why things are the way they are.
You've equated biological definitions of "life" with other definitions, and then attempted to preemptively dismiss all possible disagreement with your preferred definition. Philosophical disagreement absolutely exists on these points, whether you acknowledge it or not.
Biological definitions of life are not the only interesting definitions. From the point of view of conscious beings, a functioning conscious mind comes a lot closer to our practical boundary between "alive" and "dead"; it seems completely reasonable to consider a mind "alive" even in the absence of all else. A body without a mind is much less interesting, even if by some biological definition it's still "alive". (Conversely, we'd call a person dead even if some individual component cells in their body were still alive.)
Your automatic assumption that life requires a physical body seems entirely unsupported. And regarding reproduction, there's a trivial counterexample: a person who has lost the ability to reproduce is still alive.
And even biological definitions can vary; I certainly don't see any obvious reason why a biological definition of life needs to include an end. Death is not inherent, and hopefully it's a bug we can fix.
> it seems completely reasonable to consider a mind "alive" even in the absence of all else.
So AI is alive too if you program it to understand it's AI? Such arbitrary definitions of "life" is not interesting. What if I define life as "abstract existence in anyone's mind" - that way a person, for example, would be considered "alive" as long as he is "alive" in our memory.
Also counterexample for life with only consciousness - let's imagine that we advanced technology to be able to replace neurons with analogous mechanisms that perform same function. Now imagine your cells are slowly, gradually being replaced with these mechanisms, all while your consciousness is full intact. That means that this imaginary technology replaces your live cells with machine cells without you losing consciousness, and at the end you are entirely machine. Are you alive? I say no. If you say yes, we disagree.
Thing is, consciousness and mind is nothing but a continuity of electrical signals. No magic here. While life is entirely different concept. They are tangential. Neither of them require one another.
> a person who has lost the ability to reproduce is still alive.
I am talking about multi generational life. If I remove your brain, thus mind and consciousness, you are alive too for some time.
> I certainly don't see any obvious reason why a biological definition of life needs to include an end.
It doesn't. But an organism that doesn't die cannot adapt to environment through DNA shuffling. But there are organisms that are considered immortal, not nearly as complicated as humans though.
> Also counterexample for life with only consciousness - let's imagine that we advanced technology to be able to replace neurons with analogous mechanisms that perform same function. Now imagine your cells are slowly, gradually being replaced with these mechanisms, all while your consciousness is full intact. That means that this imaginary technology replaces your live cells with machine cells without you losing consciousness, and at the end you are entirely machine. Are you alive?
I would definitely call that "alive" (and I hope we can perfect a process very much like that).
> Thing is, consciousness and mind is nothing but a continuity of electrical signals. No magic here.
On that point we agree completely.
> While life is entirely different concept. They are tangential. Neither of them require one another.
It seems like we may just disagree on terminology, then. There's a biological definition of life that you might use to distinguish an amoeba from a rock, or a live amoeba from a dead amoeba. There's also a definition of life more appropriate for sentient beings specifically, which I would argue just includes the conscious mind; for that, "brain dead" is "dead" for all practical purposes.
> But an organism that doesn't die cannot adapt to environment through DNA shuffling.
Neither can an organism unwilling to let others die or fail to reproduce due to "lack of fitness" or similar properties. I can live with that; evolution is a remarkable but inefficient process for improvement.
> There's also a definition of life more appropriate for sentient beings specifically, which I would argue just includes the conscious mind; for that, "brain dead" is "dead" for all practical purposes.
Inanimate objects, also rocks, can also have their life, but that's just a play of words. Also what you call "life" is more accurately described as simply "experience". It's confusing to use term "life" in this context while having two unrelated concepts in mind. A mind is experiencing world, it doesn't mean it's actually alive in a sense it's life processes are working.
What you call "life" for mind and consciousness is a metaphor that you are taking too literally.
Life - working biological processes. People abstract it out to just "working processes". Consciousness is a working process, therefore by applying abstract meaning of "life" you call it alive.
So as you see there's no argument whether mind is a process or not. There is also no argument that mind has to be made of working biological system. So your whole comment is just a confusion of two different processes both of which you call life.
The trick is - most biological work we do consists of "fix enough things that the complicated and as-of-yet unreplicable biology takes over and manages the rest". Heck, advances like PCR and CRISPR are just applications of the same thing - We can't economically construct/deconstruct DNA strands, but biology has figured it out, so we piggyback on that. Sometimes we understand but don't have a more economical solution, sometimes we understand but can't replicate at all yet, and yet other times we only vaguely understand what's happening (and can't replicate). Regardless, this seems to be the march of modern medicine: The process of "observe, understand, create" is too slow when people are literally dying and suffering, so we stick in some "make best guess use of observations" in the middle.
So yeah, getting a head to talk to the body is really hard and complicated - but doing everything a body does (including feedback too/from the head) is even harder.
I want to know if anyone did NOT find it disturbing. So, yes, I found it disturbing.
Related -> a cool synchronicity happened to me while reading this article. The Roky Erikson song Two-Headed Dog came on and I realized it must be referencing that experiment!
I've always assumed if we are cloning humans for harvest and if you are cloning yourself that somehow your clone doesn't have to age the same way you did. But to the best of my knowledge you'd have to wait 18-25 years for adequate donor of your clone.
It's a weird thing. Hopefully we don't do this (Ala The Island) but can just repair replace lab grown organ or in place replacement.
But what if I'm born with a disease that ruin my kidneys by the time I'm 18? Both me and my clone will have that disease and will have ruined kidneys, so rendering him useless.
You will completely ruin that body in 2 months and have to transplant yourself on another fit body to maintain the fitness.
On the other hand, if your head gets chopped down and thrown in garbage, and fit person's head is put on, your body will live longer than it would right now with you.
Hey, hey, I take care of my mediocre body. I simply want the 6ft tall, blond haired, blue eyed model. Bonus points if you can add underwater breathing and fit in electric windows.
The article goes into this. Not only the hormones that come from the body, but also the donor body's gut flora and differing physicality from the host's would in some ways make it a new, third person who emerges from the operating room.
I really wish they would quit torturing animals for this kind of garbage. If people are so desperate to live on, why not proceed directly to human experiments?
It's pretty simple human lives have more ethical weight than animals in pretty much every culture, and I agree. Also there's a massive amount of unknowns when it comes to biology most experiments won't work but we have no way of testing without trying it out.
I see where you're coming from. One of my best friends does spinal cord research to repair severed spinal cords. This involves damaging the spinal cords of primates. It makes me feel uneasy, but there really is no other way and certainly experimenting on a person is less ethical than experimenting on an animal. No one wants to harm the animal.
Experimenting on the animal before doing it on the person is understandable. But it raises more ethical concerns, not fewer, due to the fact that the animal cannot possibly consent to the experiment.
I think that's an example of category error. Animals aren't capable of consent because they aren't capable of comprehending either consent, or the experiment in question. If they were, they'd be human by any sensible definition.
To rely on consent to perform animal experiments is like relying on my sandwich to consent to me eating it. It's just not a thing sandwiches are capable of doing.
Nobody relies on consent to perform animal experiments, because animals can't consent, so I'm not sure where you're trying to go with that.
Unlike the sandwich you're eating, animals are capable of suffering, which is why experimenting with them raises ethical issues to start with.
Some people are incapable of comprehending consent, and are incapable of comprehending scientific experiments. Those people can't be subjects of experiments, precisely for that reason. You seem to be arguing for the opposite.
How is sending people to Mars remotely legal? The astronauts undergoing this "mission" have virtually a 100% chance of dying and never making it back.
How is a heart transplant remotely legal? The patient undergoing this "surgery" has virtually a 100% chance of dying and never waking up.
How is crossing the Atlantic remotely legal? The crew undergoing this "voyage" have virtually a 100% chance of dying and never making it back.
There's a lot of things that we as humans do to push the frontier of societal knowledge with the understanding that the first to venture into the unknown may well not make it back. It's (to me) a fascinating crossover between living as an discrete individual and living as an integral part of a higher collective. It's inevitable that as we progress, we'll continue to seek out those who through their specific circumstances are willing to risk that sacrifice to help the "greater good". As the article says, informed consent plays a significant part of making this more acceptable.
"...Christiaan Barnard, a South African who performed the first human heart transplant, technically killed the first donor, a brain-dead woman, by taking her off life support without her family’s permission and giving her an injection of potassium to render her legally dead."
I was surprised to read this and naturally did some googling. I couldn't find anything about Christiaan Barnard taking the donor off of life support without her family's permission. Anyone know of evidence for this statement?
Seems like it would be a good idea to try this with a brain-dead head first to look for issues of tissue rejection etc before trying this on living person.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadEdit: The sources on wikipedia's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplant article all call it a head transplant... so, I assume people more knowledgeable than I on the topic have already "talked it out". Head transplant it is!
From the viewpoint of the patient? Which person is the donor and which is the patient?
That's the part that sues you for malpractice.
jwn's head on a different body may be taller and slimmer, but the personality remains. It should, in essence, still be "you". Vice versa and we get a completely different person but with about your height and build.
So on that basis I think I prefer to think of body transplant to head transplant.
At some point, you have to accept that language is meant to be used, and that's more important than being abstractly consistent.
(Technically, the surgery would be a body transplant, since the acquisition of a new body is what saves the patient’s life. Then again, the head makes up less than 10 percent of our body weight. Can you really “transplant” the heavier, majority part? And if rejection occurs, it will be the body rejecting the head, not vice versa.)
I think the same applies here.
After a few seconds, I remembered "the seat of identity is in the head" and I corrected the image. Anyway, for all of us reading the news before our morning coffee kicks in, I have to say that "body transplant" would more quickly convey what's actually happening.
We have no idea how to artificially provide all the functions that the body carries out. We have some baby steps like dialysis, but how would the life support system deal with infections? Or take a look at the problems that various heart assist systems have with clotting and coagulation (blood likes to stick to the artificial surfaces).
I don't think ethics works that way. Just because something is very useful doesn't necessarily mean that it's ethical.
Nuclear weapons are a case in point. Few will deny that they're very useful and effective weapons, but many believe their use to be unethical, no matter how useful they are.
Chemical and biological weapons, and cluster bombs are other similar examples.
Obviously they must also consider the other aspects of it ethical.
> I don't think ethics works that way.
I'm pretty sure that they do.
> Just because something is very useful doesn't necessarily mean that it's ethical.
OTOH, for lots of things (and surgical operations with inherent risks are pretty solidly on this list) utility is certainly relevant to (and a certain level, a prerequisite for) an action to be ethical, even if it is not sufficient alone to determine that the action is ethical.
> We need our bodies and our internal organs to live
Implies you can live without body? Neither mind, nor consciousness is live, that's why you literally don't live if you don't have body. There's no philosophical dilemma here - life must be able to replicate. Mind can't replicate. It's not alive.
> 2. We must eat to survive
Literally. A physical body, which is the only way to be alive, needs physical atoms to exist, and acquisition of the building blocks is called eating.
> 3. We must die
Only point I can semi-agree with. Life span can be reasonably extended. No immortality though.
> 4. We must work to live
Not even starting.
Assuming that we continue to require resources, then #4 will continue to be true.
Granted: as technology improves, we need to work a lot less to achieve the same quality of life.
But there's still a requirement to produce those resources; it is incumbent upon someone to work to produce them, be it a farm labourer or an engineer designing farm robots.
1. "Body" in the paragraph means "the rest of the body, excluding the brain". It is not used to mean, "the entire body, including the brain".
2. This is incorrect. The acquisition of matter is not always called eating. I'm not talking about drinking—we can group that with eating—but there are alternative ways to acquire nutrients and there are also other ways to acquire matter that do not involve nutrients. Having a nutrient IV would not involve eating, and if you got a good source of nutrients this way, it would bypass many of the biological problems involving nutrient absorption through the GI tract. Problems with nutrient absorption in the GI tract account for a worrying number of health problems in older individuals. (You can also attach matter to your body with surgery.)
As for eating, he clearly stated what he meant - power brain through electricity. Shows complete lack of basic understanding of body functions, of which brain is part of. He believes that brain is powered by electricity. Good example of this whole article - fantasy without any deeper thoughts of why things are the way they are.
Biological definitions of life are not the only interesting definitions. From the point of view of conscious beings, a functioning conscious mind comes a lot closer to our practical boundary between "alive" and "dead"; it seems completely reasonable to consider a mind "alive" even in the absence of all else. A body without a mind is much less interesting, even if by some biological definition it's still "alive". (Conversely, we'd call a person dead even if some individual component cells in their body were still alive.)
Your automatic assumption that life requires a physical body seems entirely unsupported. And regarding reproduction, there's a trivial counterexample: a person who has lost the ability to reproduce is still alive.
And even biological definitions can vary; I certainly don't see any obvious reason why a biological definition of life needs to include an end. Death is not inherent, and hopefully it's a bug we can fix.
So AI is alive too if you program it to understand it's AI? Such arbitrary definitions of "life" is not interesting. What if I define life as "abstract existence in anyone's mind" - that way a person, for example, would be considered "alive" as long as he is "alive" in our memory.
Also counterexample for life with only consciousness - let's imagine that we advanced technology to be able to replace neurons with analogous mechanisms that perform same function. Now imagine your cells are slowly, gradually being replaced with these mechanisms, all while your consciousness is full intact. That means that this imaginary technology replaces your live cells with machine cells without you losing consciousness, and at the end you are entirely machine. Are you alive? I say no. If you say yes, we disagree.
Thing is, consciousness and mind is nothing but a continuity of electrical signals. No magic here. While life is entirely different concept. They are tangential. Neither of them require one another.
> a person who has lost the ability to reproduce is still alive.
I am talking about multi generational life. If I remove your brain, thus mind and consciousness, you are alive too for some time.
> I certainly don't see any obvious reason why a biological definition of life needs to include an end.
It doesn't. But an organism that doesn't die cannot adapt to environment through DNA shuffling. But there are organisms that are considered immortal, not nearly as complicated as humans though.
I would definitely call that "alive" (and I hope we can perfect a process very much like that).
> Thing is, consciousness and mind is nothing but a continuity of electrical signals. No magic here.
On that point we agree completely.
> While life is entirely different concept. They are tangential. Neither of them require one another.
It seems like we may just disagree on terminology, then. There's a biological definition of life that you might use to distinguish an amoeba from a rock, or a live amoeba from a dead amoeba. There's also a definition of life more appropriate for sentient beings specifically, which I would argue just includes the conscious mind; for that, "brain dead" is "dead" for all practical purposes.
> But an organism that doesn't die cannot adapt to environment through DNA shuffling.
Neither can an organism unwilling to let others die or fail to reproduce due to "lack of fitness" or similar properties. I can live with that; evolution is a remarkable but inefficient process for improvement.
Inanimate objects, also rocks, can also have their life, but that's just a play of words. Also what you call "life" is more accurately described as simply "experience". It's confusing to use term "life" in this context while having two unrelated concepts in mind. A mind is experiencing world, it doesn't mean it's actually alive in a sense it's life processes are working.
What you call "life" for mind and consciousness is a metaphor that you are taking too literally.
Life - working biological processes. People abstract it out to just "working processes". Consciousness is a working process, therefore by applying abstract meaning of "life" you call it alive.
So as you see there's no argument whether mind is a process or not. There is also no argument that mind has to be made of working biological system. So your whole comment is just a confusion of two different processes both of which you call life.
I would imagine that we call a person dead long before the majority of their individual cells are dead.
It's just when they stop working together.
(This is admittedly an un-researched, intuitive opinion, but I can't see why it would be wrong, please correct me if it is).
So yeah, getting a head to talk to the body is really hard and complicated - but doing everything a body does (including feedback too/from the head) is even harder.
It's a weird thing. Hopefully we don't do this (Ala The Island) but can just repair replace lab grown organ or in place replacement.
On the other hand, if your head gets chopped down and thrown in garbage, and fit person's head is put on, your body will live longer than it would right now with you.
To rely on consent to perform animal experiments is like relying on my sandwich to consent to me eating it. It's just not a thing sandwiches are capable of doing.
Unlike the sandwich you're eating, animals are capable of suffering, which is why experimenting with them raises ethical issues to start with.
Some people are incapable of comprehending consent, and are incapable of comprehending scientific experiments. Those people can't be subjects of experiments, precisely for that reason. You seem to be arguing for the opposite.
I'm baffled by this, and can only assume it's all a big publicity stunt by the doctor.
He dies with or without it, if he wants to help humanity with his death, why shouldn't we let him?
How is a heart transplant remotely legal? The patient undergoing this "surgery" has virtually a 100% chance of dying and never waking up.
How is crossing the Atlantic remotely legal? The crew undergoing this "voyage" have virtually a 100% chance of dying and never making it back.
There's a lot of things that we as humans do to push the frontier of societal knowledge with the understanding that the first to venture into the unknown may well not make it back. It's (to me) a fascinating crossover between living as an discrete individual and living as an integral part of a higher collective. It's inevitable that as we progress, we'll continue to seek out those who through their specific circumstances are willing to risk that sacrifice to help the "greater good". As the article says, informed consent plays a significant part of making this more acceptable.
I was surprised to read this and naturally did some googling. I couldn't find anything about Christiaan Barnard taking the donor off of life support without her family's permission. Anyone know of evidence for this statement?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Dowell's_Head