Metropol

Here's a little something I've been pondering for a while:

Assume that medical science has advanced to allow a fully-functioning brain to be sustained in isolation from its body. i.e. In a jar in a laboratory. Would this be a good thing? Superficially the answer would appear to be yes. Certainly such an advancement would be a step closer to brain transplants, or to be more accurate, body transplants. A living brain could be transplanted into a brain-dead, beating-heart cadaver, thereby allowing the personality, knowledge and experiences of the brain to live on. However, the psychological effect on the brain of such a procedure is uncertain.

Assuming body transplants are possible and the shock of seeing a different face in the mirror is not sufficient to cause total psychosis, would the personality survive the isolation phase anyway? Imagine that scenario for a moment. You would have all your thoughts and memories, but you would not receive any sensory stimulation (with the possible exception of pain from the severed nerves) and you would be unable to communicate. This would truly be someone alone with his/her thoughts. Could the human psyche cope with that situation? I suspect not. We are bombarded with all sorts of sensory stimuli every day, so the total cessation of this stimuli would certainly have a profound effect. I doubt the psyche could survive it without serious psychological problems.

I'd be interested in your views.

i think if you were cut off from everything, no inputs or outputs, the resulting brain would be severely damaged - if this is possible, the brain needs to be put in a comatose state until all sensory inputs can be restored.

surely this would be worse than death - i seem to remember a women with motor neurone disease going through an extended legal process to allow her husband to help her die, and she still had a number of inputs. being stuck in this state, with no concept of time, where you are, what's going on in the world, how your family and friends are, would be deeply troubling and would result in an unstable, damaged personality.

Dr Sigmund Mohammad wrote:with no concept of time, where you are, what's going on in the world, how your family and friends are, would be deeply troubling and would result in an unstable, damaged personality.

That explains James Martin, then!