Live dissection and experimentation on “alive but drugged” human brains is mental. How do you ensure that you aren’t torturing a brain that can’t see, hear or scream? How are you held accountable?
Live dissection and experimentation on “alive but drugged” human brains is mental. How do you ensure that you aren’t torturing a brain that can’t see, hear or scream? How are you held accountable?
When I had my ear surgery about 20 years ago, the doctor explained to me that I would be awake for part of the procedure, but the anesthesia meant that I would have no memory of it.¹ It’s a weird thing to think about whether that lack of memory would obviate the pain or discomfort of the moment.
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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.
There are a lot of procedures with partial sedation. I’ve had one where I was awake and I remember the whole thing, though I was partially sedated. I didn’t feel any pain.
Purely anecdotal, but I had surgery a few years ago (relatively minor). But I could feel for months after a sort of 'unconscious PSTD' I don't know how else to describe it. Even after it was healed and the pain was gone, there was just a deep sense of 'something bad happened in there' feeling. I'd have dreams of someone digging around in my body. Anyway, it's all gone now, but a weird experience for sure.
PTSD can happen especially when something goes wrong with the anesthesia. Happened to a man named Sherman Sizemore many years ago: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/family-sues-after...
Dramatized retelling of the story at 21m04s: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ny_s07D-LT8&t=1264s
I have vivid dreams and smells from a surgery where the visions and feeling of them poking me are incredibly intense. The question is whether it’s a memory or a manifestation of fear. I rarely dream (every few years), but this vivid dream comes through on occasion.
I had the same thoughts "but won't i feel it THEN?" when I was getting an upper endoscopy. The anesthesiologist said you're in such a trance, dreamlike state plus with the inability to form memories its like you're not your real "consciousness" but something different. Sort of like your brain is in "limp mode" and its not really _you._ This was both comforting and slightly terrifying in a different way.
Obviously it would be worse if you remembered it, but the trauma is still there even if you don't. Ask Bill Cosby's victims.
> the doctor explained to me that I would be awake for part of the procedure, but the anesthesia meant that I would have no memory of it
The short story "Transition Dreams" by Greg Egan touches on this concept
I can strongly recommend reading... anything else by Egan, just not that one.
It's not that it's bad. The problem's the opposite: He poses an existentially dreadful question which I can't definitively answer with 'no'.
I had a dentist explain to me the same for getting my wisdom teeth out, as if it was a selling feature. At least for me, having my memory wiped is far more scary than just being put unconscious (or having some pain and a local anaesthetic).
> so I was unconscious for the whole thing
Or so they claim - the patient would have no memory of that anyway.
From the article:
> 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.
I recognized that anesthetic from its famous irresponsible use-
"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."
Apparently MJ was taking propofol to sleep, which another commenter said was akin to "getting a haircut by undergoing chemo".
That "another commenter" was Robin Williams - https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fZkFooaaaSo
Miss this brilliant man
—
Happy to’ve learn a URL trick on HN so I’ll reshare:
https://www.youtube.com/v/fZkFooaaaSo
Oh wow, I can't believe he was on reddit!
Between what he did to children, and what his parents did to him, it's hard to really blame the guy for having extreme sleep problems though.
> what he did to children
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...
> yet MJ was deemed guilty even after proven innocent.
He was not “proven innocent”; that’s not how the legal system works. He was “found not guilty” which is a much lower standard than “proven innocent”.
(OJ Simpson was similarly found not guilty; do you think he was also “proven innocent”?)
That article was written 16 years ago and misses a lot as a result. it doesn’t mention the new allegations, including those documented in Leaving Neverland. It also glosses over the accusations in the 1990s. It’s papered over that those allegations were lies, but he settled the lawsuit with them for over $23M.
Settling isn't an admission of guilt. It's plausible that he wanted to avoid the media circus that would inevitably result, and given that fighting it out in court was significantly more damaging to his reputation than settling the 90s case was despite being exonerated, he was probably right to settle. The article does also touch on the indications that those allegations were also not credible, although it doesn't do a deep dive.
I don't give much credence to new allegations. Where were these allegations when he was alive, and why are people still publishing documentaries? You don't need a documentary to make an allegation. They're doing it because they want to make money, then. Off a dead man, who can't defend himself.
> I don't give much credence to new allegations. Where were these allegations when he was alive
It’s worth noting that it’s common for it to take years or decades for victims to speak out against an abuser. Especially when the victims are children. Especially when the abuser is a prominent figure, like the literal King of Pop.
I’m not going to try and convince you that these allegations are credible (though I believe they are), I just want you to think about how a child victim might behave in that situation. There’s almost never any objective evidence or 3rd party witnesses of abuse. It’s almost always the word of one person against another. And it may be years before a child victim even fully understands what was happening, and years beyond that to come to terms with it.
I mean, he may have never done a sexual thing but his pedophilia was quite obvious and the degeneracy of parents to allow their children to spend the night in the bed of a grown man is not really good for society.
"he may have never done a sexual thing but his pedophilia was quite obvious"
How is it obvious pedophilia, if you say he may have never done a sexual thing to them?
because he paid families to sleep in beds and hang out with their children, this is not a normal adult man behavior, and defending it on the internet is weird.
It is not normal adult behavior and he likely should have had therapy.
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.
There is a wide, wide range between "normal behaviour" and "sex offender". I'm fine with being weird, and have no qualms defending the right of other people to be weird.
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.
And you know this because of your firsthand experience observing it... or because the media told you so? Considering how readily the media is willing to lie for engagement, the truth is more likely to be the opposite of what they report.
According to you. (And me, but just saying, society is a big place to be homogenized)
Here's a podcast deep diving into what it was he did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J1JQaIrxRU
It's not only not been proven, but the island man stuff and testimony of people like Culkin suggest he actually did the opposite of doing bad things to children and was most likely a scapegoat for the "elites" of Hollywood because of his race.
At the very least drop an "allegedly" or something to make it sound a little tasteful.
I don't trust them to always give the brain propofol. The subject has no way of reacting because they have no body, so what are they going to do?
Towards the end of the article: "the company plans to eventually remove the anesthesia from some brain slices"
Here's hoping the idea is that the slices will be really small, or something, because frankly the whole thing is utterly horrifying enough as-is.
oh, look, seems like we found the guy who can define what consciousness is! and not just that ... he even knows the lower boundary of it, too.
I think there is worlds between definitely defining what consciousness is, and what are some of the scenarios and conditions under which consciousness cannot ever happen.
And on top of that, they put a sedative, just in case.
my comment was meant a little bit humorous.
I could've done without reading the word almost
That's before they apply the anaesthetic.
Honestly, there is so much terrible terrible terrible stuff going on in the world and happening to real people, I think it is safe to say that those brains are having a blast. Relatively speaking.
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.
___
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.
> I think it is safe to say that those brains are having a blast
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.
> Live dissection and experimentation on “alive but drugged” human brains is mental.
There’s no such thing as live dissection. It’s vivisection.
Well, we know how to make living brains insensate - that's who we all make it through surgery.
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.
That’s somewhat overstated.
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.
The most important thing to know about anesthesia in the context of OP is that it often doesn't work. 'Anesthesia awareness' is real and probably more common than we think because anesthesia can easily produce awareness but block memory formation.
Keep that in mind when they make arguments about propofol... Which is one of the drugs mentioned in https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/12/surgical-... and https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/neuroscience/pain/anesthesi...
https://web.archive.org/web/20120411063647/http://squid314.l...
"What did the doctor say? He told me that they couldn’t up the anesthetic because an overdose could cause respiratory arrest, and that it wouldn’t matter because the anaesthetic on any dose caused severe short term memory loss and whatever happened the patient would forget all about it. The second point, at least, was right on. One patient spent the entire procedure writhing in agony and screaming something incoherent to God. The doctor finished the procedure, took out the endoscope, and cut off the anesthetic, and the patient turned his head, looked the doctor right in the eye, smiled, and said, laughing “Wow, that wasn’t bad at all! Guess I slept right through it!”"
Anesthesia appears to be a fairly broad effect - anaesthetics work on plants, for example [1], even though they lack any neural tissue whatsoever. It would be extremely surprising if those effects were also targeted enough to halt only some types of brain activity.
[1]: e.g. https://doi.org/10.4161/psb.27886
My understanding was that we now believe that patients under anesthesia are often "awake" but the drugs prevent them from forming memories so they can't complain once the anesthesia wears off.
Is that incorrect?
"Anesthesia" is a wider umbrella term than most people realize with many levels of sedation.
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.
More like very rarely (1-2 per 1000), very partially aware. I could not find anything saying that it was common, and it appears cases of actual awareness to the point of having pain / trauma are far rarer still. People who have this tend to have foggy memories or other concrete PTSD symptoms after the fact. It does not appear to be the norm.
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.
That's how twilight anesthesia works. That's the kind you get when having something like wisdom tooth removal or an endoscopy. They want you to be responsive to instructions but completely relaxed and unable to form memories of the event.
It's still an open debate whether the seat of consciousness (or even simpler, perception) is the brain.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_memory
Ok, I only skimmed the paper but it seems like all of the "non-local phenomena" in support of their theory are basically psychic powers. Not exactly strong evidence.
You're free to stop there. We can also turn it around, and I can ask you for any paper that details the theory of why the brain should be the location of consciousness.
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.
Sure. We can't even agree on a good definition for "consciousness", we certainly don't know _how_ it works. I don't think there's a lot of debate around that specific point.
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.
> It's still an open debate
No it's not, not by anyone serious.
We know the brain is the seat of consciousness because damage to the brain damages consciousness. There is no other organ in the body where that's true. You can completely replace all other organs without changing consciousness.
You can always find a paper by a quack that posits the earth is flat, that doesn't mean there's serious debate.
I believe to some extent that everything is conscious and that it's specifically our species' prized mental features that lessen it's level at least temporarily. purely esoterically the statement "a rock is more conscious than a human being" doesn't even seem too outrageous to me.
See also: Hridaya.
It's not a great article, and it glosses over the reality that if you hooked this brain up to an EEG it would show unequivocal brain death. CELLS of the brain are alive, but in terms of being able to function in any sort of coordinated way there that ship sailed minutes after the person who donated their organs died. The wave of depolarization that marks brain death isn't something we can reverse, and what's being done here is all about metabolism and structure rather than those much more subtle functions.
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.
> isn't something we can reverse
Until you hook it up to a lightening rod in the top of a castle!
Just remember to be a good father, or things get really epic in a gothic sort of way.
Everyone upvote this guy more, thanks
The word "alive" is doing a lot of work here. A brain is pretty much permanently fried after five to fifteen minutes without oxygen, and these are donor brains, not some emergency brain extraction team, so the timeframe will be much longer than that. There might be 'life' left in there in the technical sense, but there's no 'person' left.
Reminds me of a certain scene from Knausgård's Morning Star.
I’ll volunteer to waive my rights here. Feel free to do whatever you wish with my brain once it’s detached from my body :)
Can’t be worse than my organs being harvested for donation.
Brain does not have physical feelings, and with all other feelings cut off and not possible, even with consciousness it won’t be a horror scenario like in MetallicA’s “One”.
People go crazy in solitary confinement, and they at least have senses left. I’m not sure I’m as confident as you on this one.