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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

The head transplant boils down to 3 problems: microsurgery, nerve regeneration and immunotherapy. Each of which is incredibly complicated, but the understanding is there to do things like full hand transplants (they don't restore full function, but the doctors apparently believe them to be useful enough to be ethical).

We have no idea how to artificially provide all the functions that the body carries out. We have some baby steps like dialysis, but how would the life support system deal with infections? Or take a look at the problems that various heart assist systems have with clotting and coagulation (blood likes to stick to the artificial surfaces).

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you may find this interesting: https://medium.com/@JBramVB/the-rejection-of-the-human-condi... I discuss my thoughts on some of these things. would love to hear any opposing or agreeing views you have.

I disagree with that article completely.

> We need our bodies and our internal organs to live

Implies you can live without body? Neither mind, nor consciousness is live, that's why you literally don't live if you don't have body. There's no philosophical dilemma here - life must be able to replicate. Mind can't replicate. It's not alive.

> 2. We must eat to survive

Literally. A physical body, which is the only way to be alive, needs physical atoms to exist, and acquisition of the building blocks is called eating.

> 3. We must die

Only point I can semi-agree with. Life span can be reasonably extended. No immortality though.

> 4. We must work to live

Not even starting.

What's wrong with #4?

Assuming that we continue to require resources, then #4 will continue to be true.

Granted: as technology improves, we need to work a lot less to achieve the same quality of life.

But there's still a requirement to produce those resources; it is incumbent upon someone to work to produce them, be it a farm labourer or an engineer designing farm robots.

I think it's not really interesting if you disagree with an article simply by using a different understanding of the same words.

1. "Body" in the paragraph means "the rest of the body, excluding the brain". It is not used to mean, "the entire body, including the brain".

2. This is incorrect. The acquisition of matter is not always called eating. I'm not talking about drinking—we can group that with eating—but there are alternative ways to acquire nutrients and there are also other ways to acquire matter that do not involve nutrients. Having a nutrient IV would not involve eating, and if you got a good source of nutrients this way, it would bypass many of the biological problems involving nutrient absorption through the GI tract. Problems with nutrient absorption in the GI tract account for a worrying number of health problems in older individuals. (You can also attach matter to your body with surgery.)

How is the brain not a body? Brain is certainly not mind, neither consciousness. Why not replace it too then? Is it because he has enough imagination to think replacing heart is possible, but replacing brain isn't without losing consciousness?

As for eating, he clearly stated what he meant - power brain through electricity. Shows complete lack of basic understanding of body functions, of which brain is part of. He believes that brain is powered by electricity. Good example of this whole article - fantasy without any deeper thoughts of why things are the way they are.

You've equated biological definitions of "life" with other definitions, and then attempted to preemptively dismiss all possible disagreement with your preferred definition. Philosophical disagreement absolutely exists on these points, whether you acknowledge it or not.

Biological definitions of life are not the only interesting definitions. From the point of view of conscious beings, a functioning conscious mind comes a lot closer to our practical boundary between "alive" and "dead"; it seems completely reasonable to consider a mind "alive" even in the absence of all else. A body without a mind is much less interesting, even if by some biological definition it's still "alive". (Conversely, we'd call a person dead even if some individual component cells in their body were still alive.)

Your automatic assumption that life requires a physical body seems entirely unsupported. And regarding reproduction, there's a trivial counterexample: a person who has lost the ability to reproduce is still alive.

And even biological definitions can vary; I certainly don't see any obvious reason why a biological definition of life needs to include an end. Death is not inherent, and hopefully it's a bug we can fix.

> it seems completely reasonable to consider a mind "alive" even in the absence of all else.

So AI is alive too if you program it to understand it's AI? Such arbitrary definitions of "life" is not interesting. What if I define life as "abstract existence in anyone's mind" - that way a person, for example, would be considered "alive" as long as he is "alive" in our memory.

Also counterexample for life with only consciousness - let's imagine that we advanced technology to be able to replace neurons with analogous mechanisms that perform same function. Now imagine your cells are slowly, gradually being replaced with these mechanisms, all while your consciousness is full intact. That means that this imaginary technology replaces your live cells with machine cells without you losing consciousness, and at the end you are entirely machine. Are you alive? I say no. If you say yes, we disagree.

Thing is, consciousness and mind is nothing but a continuity of electrical signals. No magic here. While life is entirely different concept. They are tangential. Neither of them require one another.

> a person who has lost the ability to reproduce is still alive.

I am talking about multi generational life. If I remove your brain, thus mind and consciousness, you are alive too for some time.

> I certainly don't see any obvious reason why a biological definition of life needs to include an end.

It doesn't. But an organism that doesn't die cannot adapt to environment through DNA shuffling. But there are organisms that are considered immortal, not nearly as complicated as humans though.

> Also counterexample for life with only consciousness - let's imagine that we advanced technology to be able to replace neurons with analogous mechanisms that perform same function. Now imagine your cells are slowly, gradually being replaced with these mechanisms, all while your consciousness is full intact. That means that this imaginary technology replaces your live cells with machine cells without you losing consciousness, and at the end you are entirely machine. Are you alive?

I would definitely call that "alive" (and I hope we can perfect a process very much like that).

> Thing is, consciousness and mind is nothing but a continuity of electrical signals. No magic here.

On that point we agree completely.

> While life is entirely different concept. They are tangential. Neither of them require one another.

It seems like we may just disagree on terminology, then. There's a biological definition of life that you might use to distinguish an amoeba from a rock, or a live amoeba from a dead amoeba. There's also a definition of life more appropriate for sentient beings specifically, which I would argue just includes the conscious mind; for that, "brain dead" is "dead" for all practical purposes.

> But an organism that doesn't die cannot adapt to environment through DNA shuffling.

Neither can an organism unwilling to let others die or fail to reproduce due to "lack of fitness" or similar properties. I can live with that; evolution is a remarkable but inefficient process for improvement.

> There's also a definition of life more appropriate for sentient beings specifically, which I would argue just includes the conscious mind; for that, "brain dead" is "dead" for all practical purposes.

Inanimate objects, also rocks, can also have their life, but that's just a play of words. Also what you call "life" is more accurately described as simply "experience". It's confusing to use term "life" in this context while having two unrelated concepts in mind. A mind is experiencing world, it doesn't mean it's actually alive in a sense it's life processes are working.

What you call "life" for mind and consciousness is a metaphor that you are taking too literally.

Life - working biological processes. People abstract it out to just "working processes". Consciousness is a working process, therefore by applying abstract meaning of "life" you call it alive.

So as you see there's no argument whether mind is a process or not. There is also no argument that mind has to be made of working biological system. So your whole comment is just a confusion of two different processes both of which you call life.

> Conversely, we'd call a person dead even if some individual component cells in their body were still alive.

I would imagine that we call a person dead long before the majority of their individual cells are dead.

It's just when they stop working together.

(This is admittedly an un-researched, intuitive opinion, but I can't see why it would be wrong, please correct me if it is).

"the doctors apparently believe them to be useful enough to be ethical"

I don't think ethics works that way. Just because something is very useful doesn't necessarily mean that it's ethical.

Nuclear weapons are a case in point. Few will deny that they're very useful and effective weapons, but many believe their use to be unethical, no matter how useful they are.

Chemical and biological weapons, and cluster bombs are other similar examples.

Fortunately we all understood this to be in the context of performing a medical operation.

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. Are you saying that usefulness trumps ethics in medicine but not in warfare? If so, why do you think that?

Of course it doesn't "trump ethics." In the context of a hand transplant, the likelihood of the procedure resulting in a useful hand is a large part of deciding whether or not it's ethical. The likelihood of improved quality of life is weighed against the likelihood of pain and complications.

My meaning was that hand transplants would (probably) be unethical if the result provided no function. The technique is good enough that the benefits outweigh the costs.

Obviously they must also consider the other aspects of it ethical.

> "the doctors apparently believe them to be useful enough to be ethical"

> I don't think ethics works that way.

I'm pretty sure that they do.

> Just because something is very useful doesn't necessarily mean that it's ethical.

OTOH, for lots of things (and surgical operations with inherent risks are pretty solidly on this list) utility is certainly relevant to (and a certain level, a prerequisite for) an action to be ethical, even if it is not sufficient alone to determine that the action is ethical.

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