Consider this: You’re a domestic pig, a Sus domesticus. You’ve spent your entire life in a spotless pen, cared for by nice people in white coats. They feed you, they clean your pen. It’s not a bad life. Sure, you’d be better off rooting around in the mud, but the pen is all you’ve ever known. One day, the nice people lead you from your pen into a very bright room and lift you onto a table. You trust the nice people, so no worries. They give you a shot of something, and you get very sleepy. Maybe you’ll just take a bit of a nap. Everything is dark and quiet…
Then you’re awake. Wide awake. Completely blind and completely deaf. All actual sensation replaced by terrifying hallucinations. Excruciating pain from full-body neuropathy. You scream and thrash. But you don’t make a sound and are completely motionless. Why? Because you’re a brain in a jar, every one of your nerves severed, your body lifeless in the dumpster, your brain kept alive by pumps and artificial blood. The torture continues until the nice people finally turn off the pumps.
Farfetched? Not at all. Take a look at U.S. Patent 4666424 on how to keep a severed head alive and U.S. Patent Publication 2024/0292830 on keeping a disembodied brain alive.
Re-animating pig brains after death is real. Chinese researchers discovered how to bring a pig brain back to life up to an hour after all blood circulation stopped.
Keeping disembodied pig brains alive has become a competitive sport. The University of Texas kept a disembodied pig brain alive for five hours. MIT reanimated pig brains for 36 hours. Yale can keep a disembodied pig brain alive for four days. Incidentally, the Yale researchers take steps to prevent consciousness by the revived pig brains. The other researchers? Hmm.
Not macabre enough for you? How about immortality through surgery? There is a real, actual proposal to transplant a human head on the headless body of another person, which is not as crazy as it sounds. Here’s an immortality invention: U.S. Patent 9,451,899, which addresses recording your perceptions, experiences and memories (that is, your personality) and transferring your personality to another person or to a machine:
It is also an objective to extend the mortality of humans, machines, or a combination thereof, by extending their consciousness and memory beyond their natural body or machine lifespan via mind, body, and machine replication, implantation, substitution.
I’m sure it works great.
Incidentally, ‘The Brain That Wouldn’t Die’ was a 1962 horror movie about, well, the title says it all.
Happy Halloween!
— Robert Yarbough, Esq.