Project PYRRHO, Specimen 46, Vat 7 Activity recorded M.Y. 2302.22467 (TERMINATION OF SPECIMEN ADVISED)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052646/mediaviewer/rm713036545...
Once you go much more granular, there's no particular spot to make a distinction between "alive" and "not alive", until you stop seeing any electrical, biochemical and mechanical activity of any kind, at which point you're basically saying "inert".
It seems that the likelihood is high that the right animal model would yield superior data???
Just please don't remove my brain before I'm 1000% certainly dead.
There's some fraction of people who would prefer to be kept alive as a brain in a jar, depending on the alternatives, but getting to that point is going to require a bunch of people to volunteer to undergo excruciating torture as we learn how to keep the brain alive, how to keep them comfortable, how to keep them conscious, sane and let them interact with the world.
> Bexorg obtains brains in partnership with organizations that procure donated organs for transplantation, and Vrselja says once families understand the company’s process and goals, their response is overwhelmingly positive.
> The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures.
"Attention to the risks of off-label use of propofol increased in August 2009, after the release of the Los Angeles County coroner's report that musician Michael Jackson was killed by a mixture of propofol and the benzodiazepine drugs lorazepam, midazolam, and diazepam on 25 June 2009." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propofol
Used properly, however:
"To induce general anesthesia, propofol is the drug used almost exclusively, having largely replaced sodium thiopental."
It just invokes a strong emotional response because it's so "abnormal", but if you think about it, there is so much more pain going on where no one bats an eye.
Perfectly avoidable pain even. So it's not even that aspect.
There’s no such thing as live dissection. It’s vivisection.
Presumably they're doing something similar - or using some other well-understood mechanism - to ensure that's not the case.
> The brains are already almost devoid of the coordinated neural firing necessary even for minimal consciousness, says Brendan Parent, a bioethicist at New York University Langone Health and one of six ethicists on Bexorg’s advisory board. But the company also forestalls any electrical activity with the anesthetic propofol, among other measures. Bexorg obtains brains in partnership with organizations that procure donated organs for transplantation, and Vrselja says once families understand the company’s process and goals, their response is overwhelmingly positive.
We know anesthesia "works," and we know some of its molecular targets, but we do not fully know the mechanism by which it produces unconsciousness, ie whether anesthesia eliminates experience, or mainly blocks memory, report, and integrated neural processing.
IMO the more questionable aspect of this entire operation is the use of "AI" to reach conclusions about how the test molecules are being metabolized, but that's a lot less compelling than implying that some company is somehow preserving life in a disembodied brain.