38 replies to this topic

[Herb Elwood III]

Dr. White is dead, growing new bodies for organ harvesting is illegal, BCIs are improving, and it's for a class project.

[Herb Elwood III]

bgwowk: what amazing scientific source told you that? i bet i can find six others who think differently.

[bgwowk]

bgwowk: what amazing scientific source told you that?
(that a heart-lung machine and dialysis machine are insufficient for long-term life support)

Um, any of the thousands of people who've died within days of their LIVER failing?

I do know what I'm talking about. I'm working with government funding right now to build a machine just to sustain beating human hearts for a few hours. A pump and oxygenator is not enough. Maintenance of metabolic substrate is a real issue, even more of an issue than waste removal.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Without bone marrow and a working immune system, one bacterium or virus would destroy your brain. You have no idea of the practical difficulty of what you are proposing. No idea. This is not a near-term technology.

---BrianW

Edited by bgwowk, 29 October 2005 - 05:49 AM.

[johnuk]

For more information see "Perpetual Thinking Device" topic in the "introduce yourself" part of this online forum.  Your answers will be used for marketing research to determine the sustainability of a firm that would offer this as an alternative or adjunct to Cryonic suspension.

If I vote in this thread do I get a vat for material price / credit / save-away / bonus, mega discount? [lol]

This scheme is totally ridiculous with current technology.  Once again, herb, if patients today cannot be kept alive when EVERYTHING is working normally except the liver, why do you presume you can dispense with every organ in the body including the liver?

I think the lack of the rest of the body would probably go some way to easing the load on the support equipment.

A 128 channel EEG interfaces represent an extremely lame way of interfacing with the physical world, but then Steven Hawking doesn't have much more than a single channel of output in his present state and he's yet to kill himself.

Personally, I'm more interested in the prospect of using BCI's for altered states / physical forms of consciousness over the brain vat idea. But perhaps the brain vat could be used more like a biostasis, and the neural tissue could simply be anesthetised during it's stay at brain vat central. Storage temperature could be lowered, but kept above freezing, to reduce cellular activity but avoid the problems of cryostasis (Referencing people who've fallen into frozen lakes and been pulled out, alive, 15 to 30 minutes later).

I am kind of interested in why you've left the spinal cord dangling down in the pictures. None of that would really be needed in brain vat mode. It might make neural connection with the outside world easier (the cord splits into rib like projections of neural bundles, as you move down it's length, that correspond to different sensory areas of the body), but the extra volume means you'd need a bigger vat, which means more blood in the system and a greater chance of failure. You don't want to get rid of the rest of the body and then end up using the same amount of, or more, blood. Also, blood that isn't properly circulated (Sitting in puddles or knocked too much by our, presently, badly designed mechanical pumps) has a tendancy to deform and clot.

To solve the blood issues, amass a fortune whilst you have a physical body. Once in vat mode, use this wealth to buy pints of fresh virgin girls' blood each day. Discard each charge of blood each morning and start with some fresh and warm from some pretty girls. In fact, why involve blood banks, just tap it directly into the vat. That's the way Mr. Burn's would do it anyway! [lol]

[Santos]

...we must think in another way, in change organic systems for digital systems. Like a body can be preserve, a mind can be preserve, not a brain, just a mind. Organic systems will be always fragile and need oxygen and organic energy source. The more difficult point is to develop a digital system enought complex to lodge a mind, however minds can be retain and save in digital recorders until a system like that can be developed.

[Santos]

...something more; look at this article (if someone had not saw it): Goodbye to human identity:
http://mondediplo.com/2001/08/15neuro

[Herb Elwood III]

oh there's also Flourinert, a hemoglobin replacement

[Herb Elwood III]

homosapiens: the article was interesting. i'd rather like to wonder if the author is very technically minded. it may be that some of the article is diluted by downspeak. i think there is a level of brain mapping which has already taken place that does give us information regarding the brain's emotional and cognitive functions, even if it is not yet complete. i also think that things that in today's worked, things appear farther than they are really.

[Herb Elwood III]

http://plato.stanfor...ries/brain-vat/