Non-motoring > Human Head Transplants Miscellaneous
Thread Author: devonite Replies: 23
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 Tue 20 Sep 16 12:35 
 Human Head Transplants - devonite
According to Google News a Doctor is stating that he could actually do this by 2017!
Question is: Would you?

I would think that it would actually be a full body transplant if you were "the Head" in question, if it was your Head that needed replacing it wouldn't be you!

Either way I think I would choose either Death or to remain how I was, but everyone has different thoughts.

Do you think this op would be viable, if it was, would it be ethical? I am not against transplant surgery at all but I think Heads are going too far!

www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3798056/Head-transplant-surgeon-plans-controversial-Frankenstein-experiments-reanimate-corpses.html
Last edited by: devonite on Tue 20 Sep 16 at 12:35
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 Tue 20 Sep 16 13:25 
 Human Head Transplants - Dog
It brings a whole new perspective to the phrase you can't put an old head on young shoulders.

:)
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 Tue 20 Sep 16 13:36 
 Human Head Transplants - CGNorwich
I'd go for one and a spare.. Two heads are better than one.
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 Tue 20 Sep 16 13:39 
 Human Head Transplants - Dog
I've heard of getting ahead but this tops the lot.
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 Tue 20 Sep 16 13:47 
 Human Head Transplants - CGNorwich
I wouldn't have the brass neck.
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 Tue 20 Sep 16 14:01 
 Human Head Transplants - devonite
It's a good 50/50 bet though! - Heads you win, Heads you lose!
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 Tue 20 Sep 16 14:18 
 Human Head Transplants - smokie
Isn't it more of a body transplant really, presuming the head retains the brain (and therefore personality and knowledge etc).
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 Tue 20 Sep 16 15:30 
 Human Head Transplants - Ambo
Ah, Cartesian dualism again. Who am I, my mind or my body? Roald Dahl has a story about a living male brain kept in a suitable fluid in a glass jar, at last under the total control of his wife, able to understand but not answer back. The brain is the person.

I wouldn't mind giving it a go but will wait till it is possible for heads to be wired up and run through test software to establish acceptable souls i.e. unique sets of characteristics.
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 Tue 20 Sep 16 16:11 
 Human Head Transplants - devonite
>>Isn't it more of a body transplant really, presuming the head retains the brain (and therefore personality and knowledge etc).

That's the way I view it, if it's your head it's you - if it's somebody else's your dead! ;-)
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 Tue 20 Sep 16 16:19 
 Human Head Transplants - rtj70
Anyone else remember the monkey head transplant doctor in the mid seventies?

I thought fixing the human spine when it is severed was beyond doctors at the moment. Therefore a head transplant would leave you paralysed from the head down surely.
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 Tue 20 Sep 16 16:29 
 Human Head Transplants - CGNorwich
Proposal Seems to be a bit of dead end

What we should be looking at is downloading the contents of the brain which presumably contains the essence of a person. Now if we could download all that info stored in our skulls onto some sort of hard drive we would become immortal. We could take back ups of ourselves to avoid being accidentally deleted.

Once we were reduced to a digital format we would be free of our bodies which in engineering terms are a bit rubbish anyway. Quite frankly something built of meat and chalk was never going to be that durable compared with titanium and carbon fibre.

Once we became digital entities all sorts of possibilities open up. We can replace physical travel with being sent electronically and just plugged into a new body at the other end. We can have as many versions of ourselves as we like. It's the way forward.



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 Tue 20 Sep 16 19:04 
 Human Head Transplants - Robin O'Reliant
SQ

>> Once we became digital entities all sorts of possibilities open up. We can replace physical
>> travel with being sent electronically and just plugged into a new body at the other
>> end. We can have as many versions of ourselves as we like. It's the way
>> forward.

And that would mean another damn charger to cart round everywhere, I suppose?
Last edited by: VxFan on Tue 20 Sep 16 at 21:38
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 Tue 20 Sep 16 20:05 
 Human Head Transplants - smokie
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4h5c4ND-Bs
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 Tue 20 Sep 16 21:09 
 Human Head Transplants - CGNorwich
I propose a massive technological leap forward and all I get is negativity.
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 Tue 20 Sep 16 22:26 
 Human Head Transplants - Dog
If you had a choice, would you rather snuggle up in bed to someone built of meat and chalk, or something built of titanium and carbon fibre. Difficult one that.

8-)



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 Wed 21 Sep 16 09:21 
 Human Head Transplants - Cliff Pope
It's an obvious assumption to make, that the YOU is really contained in the brain, but I wonder if even that is actually true?

People can I think make fundamental changes in their personalities given momentous changes in their circumstances - great power, sudden wealth, shock, etc.
Also the chemical background that the new brain would be operating in might be different, and the responses from different organs and limbs attached might influence the brain.
The brain is enormously adaptive, and if it woke up say to find that it now had delicate surgeon's hands at its disposal instead of road-digger's, who knows how it might respond to the changed circumstances?

I don't think the analogy with a hard drive really works. A hard drive has only the memory and processing power that has been loaded into it, but a brain has a vast subconscious memory and abilities which are hardly ever tapped. The personality that emerges and presents itself may not be the only possible one, and a different brain put in similar circumstances might tend to take on some of the attributes of the previous occupant.

It might actually be rather fun - acting like the person everyone takes you for, but free to play the maverick from time to time. I mustn't say any more, or I'll reveal too much. :)
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 Wed 21 Sep 16 10:12 
 Human Head Transplants - VxFan
I thought it had been proven that the rectum is in charge of the body.

joek.com/jokes/joke_102.shtml

;)
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 Wed 21 Sep 16 10:31 
 Human Head Transplants - devonite
Deep in thought yesterday,when I was a kid, I remember that one of my G/Fathers (a well traveled man, Merchant Navy) had a carved African Head out of some Black Wood, which he kept on his book-case, he always referred to it as Edward (Edwood) - I never did get the joke!
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 Wed 21 Sep 16 16:32 
 Human Head Transplants - CGNorwich
Whilst the analogy with a hard drive is simplistic the fact remains that the brain is a a biological machine and in theory at least it should be possible to duplicate its functions and express those functions digitally.
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 Wed 21 Sep 16 16:51 
 Human Head Transplants - Manatee
>> Whilst the analogy with a hard drive is simplistic the fact remains that the brain
>> is a a biological machine and in theory at least it should be possible to
>> duplicate its functions and express those functions digitally.

A somewhat pedantic point and probably wrong, but it might be one of those things that (eventually) happens in more or less practical terms, but is impossible in theory. Digital music for example can only ever be an approximation of the real sound it represents given that there is a sampling rate.

If the brain's state could be saved to a hard drive, and a suitable processor and I/O be developed to run its operations, then not only would immortality be thinkable, but it would be possible to opt out of boring times (the two weeks of the Olympics for example) simply by switching off for the duration (provided you have someone you can trust to switch you back on).
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 Wed 21 Sep 16 17:09 
 Human Head Transplants - MJM
Rupert Sheldrake is worth a read, Manatee, even if it's just for another view on mind, memory and brain function.

Search for him on Amazon
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 Wed 21 Sep 16 18:09 
 Human Head Transplants - Manatee
>> Rupert Sheldrake is worth a read, Manatee, even if it's just for another view on
>> mind, memory and brain function.

Thanks MJM. I'm wary of spending time on it, even though it is interesting. The problem, I find, is that such debates always contain, on both sides of the argument, many assertions that are stated as facts and are in practice impossible for the lay reader to validate or have a satisfactory view on.

An example (from a skim of his website) is his position on ESP. Crudely, he states I think in effect that it is empirically proven to exist but that it continues to be denied by materialist science, rather than being filed under "unexplained". I do not know whether his premise is sound or not.

(FWIW, my position on that is that the majority of 'supernatural' stuff is rubbish, including for example homeopathy, but that there are some phenomena sometimes lumped in with the rubbish that are real, but unexplained. I stop well short of ascribing any of it to the spirit world or the space people.)
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 Wed 21 Sep 16 17:25 
 Human Head Transplants - CGNorwich
Surely it is possible to create music digitally. I think you are confusing digital recording with musical creation. If you sing a note you brain somehow has given the relevant instructions to your voice box etc to create that note. It doesn't play back a recording. That process can surely be duplicated digitally

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 Wed 21 Sep 16 17:48 
 Human Head Transplants - Manatee
Well I'm not going to fight in a ditch over it, I'm just thinking aloud really.

Of course it is possible to create digital music. But digitising a non-digital process necessarily has a level of resolution, that is to say a degree of inexactness, doesn't it?

It might not matter, depending on the process. But it might. Since nobody knows how the brain works, it seems likely that it is difficult to know.

The digital replica might approach, possibility to the point of infinitesimal difference, the original process. Perhaps they can even converge at the point where resolution is limited by the size of atoms, speed of light, quantum of energy or whatever. For which you would need an impossibly large computer, which can of course exist in a thought experiment.
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