You’ve seen instances of quadruple amputees, people losing their lower half and instestines, etc. After playing a bit of Deus Ex I started wondering exactly how much of a person needs to exist for them to survive (not talking quality of life, but just enough to communicate intelligently). How far could you do it with only natural parts and then how far could you go with artificial parts too?
It really depends what you mean by survive.
You could do ECMO and dialysis and get rid of the heart, lungs and kidneys, parenteral nutrition to feed via an IV so no need for a gut.
The patient would be bed bound and at immediate risk of dying from a complication but in theory that’s basically an empty abdominal cavity connected to a brain and a bunch of machines.
You would need enough decent sized blood vessels left to connect it all up but otherwise not much physically.
That’s basically exactly what I was getting at. So theoretically, at least with machines, you would only need your head to survive.
Maybe, you’d want to talk to someone like an intensive care doctor really but yeah a lot of your organs can be replaced mechanically these days at least for a while.
Can they really replace the liver and the kidney long term? That would be news to me.
On constant dialysis that you never get unhooked from, I don’t see why not.
If you can just pipe nutrient-rich blood into the brain directly you can probably bypass the entire digestive system. That takes care of the liver, and with the only waste products coming from the body being whatever the brain produces, that should be a pretty light workload for an artificial kidney.
I think dialysis damages the blood from what a web search suggests to me, so I doubt that would work non-stop.
Weird way to think about it, but you could partition up conjoined twins in this way when they share biological infrastructure.
Yea, we can probably keep a head alive by itself for a short period, I suspect as you pointed out that the “immediate risk of dying from a complication” means if we attempted it the first person wouldn’t even last weeks or months.
The ethics of doing so on the other hand are stupidly complicated, which deters almost all effort in the development of this kind of system. You couldn’t ethically do it to anything smarter than a pig without huge problems, and you may even have trouble with that.
I’m honestly surprised we haven’t seen any hint of this coming out from some random billionaire funding a bunch of doctors to work on it behind the scenes. I’m sure there are doctors who for the right price would be willing to move to some country with less-stringent regulations and attempt some tests on chimps.
Give it a few months. Those assholes have a whole island state off the coast of Honduras so that they can skirt development regulation. Peter fucking Theil. It’s only a matter of time before Elon grabs his neuralink and joins the psychopath “accomplishment is the only reason to live” circle jerk for the transhumanist bullshit.