The Ethics of Consciousness Hunting | Hacker News Reader

The Ethics of Consciousness Hunting

nautil.us

93 pointsdnetesn10 comments

Is it really true that patients are diagnosed as vegetative without any attempt to check for brain activity with at least an EEG?

That jumped out at me too.

Can you imagine listening to your doctor and loved ones discussing taking you off life support and you're just not able to move? Then a lot of times, they just starve the patient to death, thinking they're basically not feeling anything, so then you starve to death while your family sits by your side. That's hell. We need to do a lot more research on conciousness and what makes a person or "animal" have that spark.

If you want this added to the standard of care, then work on having it introduced at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital. Seriously.

How much consciousness is enough to justify living?

They make the point that this can prevent unnecessary care but ignore this. It's unlikely to be a simple yes or no.

This won't answer the question directly, but these sorts of discussions always bring to my mind the famous quote from Jeremy Bentham: "The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?"

I wonder if the results you would get from an EEG in these cases are different from those of a healthy person. If not, it should be possible for them to communicate using e.g. morse code through EEG.

The article mentioned that after 5 yes-or-no questions in 60 minutes, the patients became exhausted. I'm guessing that activating certain parts of the brain requires considerably more effort for them than for a healthy person based on that.

The areas in question are areas tied to physical activity. They've been lying in a bed for a decade. It's not surprising that activating areas tied to physical activities is difficult.

I'm curious if the same fatigue would be present if the Yes/No responses were tied to critical thinking activities (though those are obviously more ambiguous to detect).

As someone with a traumatic brain injury from over two years ago that stI'll had cognitive problems on a daily basis preventing me from a range of tasks such as working in IT (careel of 10+ years) to (depending on the day) understanding the question "are you hungry?": i get mentally fatigued from answering questions, both critical and non critical thinking. Both are taxing and after less than an hour of ~15 questions I am unable to proceed or comprehend the information. The best analog I could give is when you wake up groggy and turn on a tv show that is in a language you don't know. Your brain is trying and searching but there are no connections being made and you only are aware that you are struggling but can do anything about it besides rest and give your brain time to recouperate.

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