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gjm comments on LINK: New clinical trial will try to restore dead brains - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: polymathwannabe 04 May 2016 08:05PM

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Comment author: gjm 05 May 2016 12:43:26AM -2 points [-]

I wonder why they're trying this on brain-dead patients first.

Nothing to lose.

If your brain is gradually degenerating, a treatment that might fix it or might (say) give you cancer and kill you horribly in short order might well seem like a good deal on balance, but I expect you'd have to think about it. But if you're already brain-dead, nothing this treatment does to you can make things worse.

The question I'd be asking instead is: Why haven't they published their results showing success in (say) rats? Except actually I probably wouldn't bother asking because the chance of this being anything other than bullshit seems so very very small.

Comment author: Viliam 05 May 2016 09:05:17AM *  1 point [-]

Worst case is IMHO that a new person will be created in an old and damaged body.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 July 2016 07:00:21AM 1 point [-]

How would you tell, what would this "new person" theory predict differently then the old person theory?

Comment author: gjm 05 May 2016 10:06:31AM -2 points [-]

How plausible that is depends, I think, on what you mean by "person".

Comment author: WalterL 05 May 2016 01:11:55PM 0 points [-]

They are probably thinking of person as a soul. Kickstarting the brain might give you different thoughts or some other trivial thing, but the ghost should be the same, right?

Comment author: buybuydandavis 05 May 2016 11:46:36AM 0 points [-]

I first wrote the quote below first. I'm not so sure now. Maybe some personality is basically damage.

No, I don't think you get a new person. Any damage or distortion won't project onto another person in mindspace, but just a broken or distorted version of you. There may be less of you, but not more of someone else.

Comment deleted 14 June 2016 03:14:10AM [-]