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?
There are a great many politicians who only appear to be the arsehole (with no other redeeming features) and remain alive.
Good news, everyone!
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.
The book Johnny Got His Gun kind of answers this question. In the book, a WWI soldier gets blown up by an artillery shell and wakes up in a hospital missing most of his body. He has lost his arms, legs, nose, mouth, eyes, and ears.
In the end he learns he can communicate with a nurse by tapping his head in Morse code. So it would seem as long as you could move you head with your neck, you can still communicate with others.
I'm the boss, this is champagne, merry ChristmasNow I have this stuck in my head again
Communication only needs the brain nowadays, neuralink is shit but there are options for similar brain-machine interface that are workable for paralyzed people.
Survival is harder. Ecmo, parenteral nutrition, and dialysis are organ supplements not replacements. Lacking lungs, GI, or kidneys will kill you. Dialysis supplements kidney function. Ecmo supplements lungs that are reduced capability. Parenteral nutrition supplements reduced GI function. There are mechanical hearts/assitive devices one dude had a mech heart one for years but you still need blood pumping. The liver has no assitive device you die in 24h without.
I think the mech hearts typically tend to lead to issues after a while. We’re probably not quite there yet, so I’ve heard. (Not that I have any expert knowledge, at all.)
Yeah, as with most implants there are issues with biofilm/plaques and immunity. They are also not responsive to loading so don’t allow exercise, affect vasculature weirdly etc.
I like science fiction so I find this interesting. I’m not qualified to answer, but while the skull is probably needed, probably not eyes and nose and jaw 🫥 right? And beyond that just neck to connect things and to swallow liquid food, and some parts of the torso. I guess the question then remains how much of the torso.
Then we start getting into philosophy on self and also how much machine assistance is allowed. If you can provide nutrition and oxygen to the brain, you could probably be a brain in a jar and still count.
That’s the way I see it. We’re brains, and everything else is support
It certainly looks nervous
While true, I assumed we’re talking current day technology!
There’s actually a podcast episode on this! One co-host’s Matt Parker, if you know who that is.
