The token "ethic" didn't have a single hit on the page. The mind in that brain could be undergoing tremendous stress. Also didn't talk about level of consciousness. :(
Consciousness is not especially well-understood, and there's some evidence that even under general anaesthesia, humans experience disconnected consciousness (i.e., consciousness without a perception of environment). It's not unreasonable to think this may be true in pigs, as well.
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. ...
I can hardly see how this living brain is having living conditions appropriate to the Sus domesticus (domesticated pig) species. The living conditions are totally unnatural and seem to be in direct violation of item d of the IACUC approval criteria.
Given the rest of criterion (d), which discusses feeding and housing, I'd assume "living conditions" refer to the times when the animal is not actively being experimented on. Sections (a) and (b) do refer to experimental procedures and may require experimenters to use anaesthesia, which the paper mentions several times.
Perhaps, and I think you're probably right about the "spirit of the law", but I would hope that the "letter of the law" would still hold weight and have to be applied here.
If they have bypassed the body entirely, there will at least be reduced hormonal stressors such as adrenaline since those are mostly created in the body on the adrenal glands. Small comfort though as plenty of other stuff is made in the brain.
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?
Come back to this when you're old, or another circumstance where your life is failing. You might not have the same mindset as when death seems like something in the distance that is happening to other people, or you far in the future.
I've talked to multiple people who want to live forever, at various stages of their lives.
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?)
I saw you palm that card. Not being able to die is just not being able to die. Rejuvenation is a different, and I suspect a considerably harder, problem.
RE (): one also needs to filter out the religious folks who believe in some kind of an afterlife, as they likely expect that to be a better deal than anything humans can come up with on their own.
I think we have enough resources to go around now. We just don't allocate them fairly. People and companies like making money and resist change, resist other technologies and sabotage them politically, as an example.
people generally get tired of life because their body is failing. I'm sure you could find exceptions where people were just ... bored ... and ready to die, but this would be the extreme minority.
>There's a finite amount of ... experiences
I very much doubt that is the case in anything but the most pedantic, philosophical sense.
Because accepting the inevitability of death is a transformative insight that helps you live more richly, with less fear, and with a greater sense of contentment?
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.
This is written so scarily, honestly. It sounds like you're trying to convince somebody to die who doesn't need to or want to.
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").
Personally I don't want to live forever. Though one might argue people only live longer than they wish to because their body falls apart around their consciousness, or they are faced with losing their consciousness slowly (such as Robin Williams)
I can easily plan out a few hundred years of activities.
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.
I can easily think of 150 years of things to do simply as a brain in a vat.
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.
Well, I wouldn't choose it for fun. It would be as an alternative to death, and it would be a minimally-acceptable state. More would be better.
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. :)
Me not wanting to live forever has nothing to do with a lack of things to do while living forever. As you said, if there were a post-scarcity society to make it so I don't have to work for food and housing it would help, but living is hard. Having to eat is a hassle. I'm 33 and tired of the speed I made my brain go on social media and have been slowing everything in my life down as a result.
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!
You, personally, probably won't be sold on it - the concept is straightforward, so it's not like there's much you could be missing. If we manage it in your lifetime, you can simply die and let live.
But the you of next year isn't the you who is reading this thread, either. And the you reading this thread isn't 10-year-old you. You think you have continuity of experience, but do you really? If the copy of you thinks it has continuity of experience, what's the difference, really?
We don't even reliably have continuity of experience between one day and the next! Are you sure the "you" who wakes from a dreamless night's sleep is the same "you" who went to bed the night before?
I can be reasonably sure when I have memories of laying down in the same bed I woke up in, while waking up in a digital world isn't likely to be something I'd find normal the first time. More scary would be the thought that the real me is out in the real world still while the digital version knows it's a fake.
All it can tell you that you remember going to bed, and nothing between that and waking up, is that that's what you remember. Nothing guarantees that's all there is to remember, and memory editing has already been reduced to standard-of-care medical practice in the form of pharmaceuticals such as midazolam. Why assume nothing similar would be possible in the virtualized case?
That may be true physically, but metaphysically? I'm Catholic so I believe I have a soul which is immaterial. Setting aside my belief that my soul cannot be inserted into a computer, this reminds me of a conversation I had with my brother in law about this topic in general. He eventually said as long as some version of himself lives on, he would be content with that even if "he" in his body doesn't live on. A digital soul, in that case.
Assuming a identity must be a continuous single path through spacetime
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?
Unless my body is destructively uploaded, the me that wakes up in the robot body will not be the same me that wakes up after the upload since I'll still be in my body. Brain in a jar gets around this, but that's semi-destructive.
There exists a school of thought which may or may not intend as a serious proposition that the optimal individual response, to an incontrovertible demonstration of working human mind uploading technology, is immediate suicide by means guaranteeing fine mechanical disassembly of the brain, or at least a significant fraction of the neocortex.
This seems like being somewhere in the same broad category of problem.
I'm disappointed that the only reference to Futurama in the comments is a tangential one.
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.
I'm more disappointed there's no reference to early 80s Steve Martin movie "The Man with Two Brains", as he literally wanders around talking to a brain in a jar.
The problem of living forever reminded me of this quote:
“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
The title is a little misleading. It's about connecting the brain up to an external blood supply, basically, so it can continue to live without the heart and lungs running (useful for surgery, perhaps) and so in theory changes in blood chemistry affects the brain can be experimented on without also having to deal with different metabolic/chemical signals from the rest of the body. No brains were removed from their skulls
There was recently an article posted about inducing lucid dreams on demand. Why not remove a brain from a skull and induce lucid dreams on it perpetually? Perhaps then there could be a way to read brainwaves to see how the mind is doing, maybe even extract crude imagery.
Perhaps this a way to offer some life extension for the terminally ill.
In the 1990s there used to be company called "Loompanics" which carried all sorts of unconventional and fringe publications. One of my favorite entries in the Loompanics catalog was the 1988 book "If We Can Keep a Severed Head Alive...Discorporation and U.S. Patent 4,666,425".
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!
Feels like we’re ever closer to the Futurama heads-in-jar.
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.
78 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 57.6 ms ] threadI'm surprised this work got approval from the Institutional Animal Care & Use Committee.
https://olaw.nih.gov/resources/tutorials/iacufoot.htm
I can hardly see how this living brain is having living conditions appropriate to the Sus domesticus (domesticated pig) species. The living conditions are totally unnatural and seem to be in direct violation of item d of the IACUC approval criteria.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?
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?)
>There's a finite amount of ... experiences
I very much doubt that is the case in anything but the most pedantic, philosophical sense.
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.
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.
Personally I'd be interested in seeing what sort of insights I could come up with over the course of a couple thousand years.
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.
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. :)
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!
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?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUv7UNbJ34M
This seems like being somewhere in the same broad category of problem.
Good jar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqaAs_3azSs
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:
- written by George Orwell ~1937 in a book intended for general audience - he avoids uncommon or unclear metaphors. http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/11.html“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
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!
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.