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gjm comments on LINK: New clinical trial will try to restore dead brains - Less Wrong Discussion
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I wonder why they're trying this on brain-dead patients first. If you've found a way to regenerate brain tissue, aren't there a million other applications besides this one? Why not use it on patients with neurodegenerative diseases or something?
Also, it seems like the efficacy of the treatment would depend heavily on where the lesions were. If the stuff that corresponds to 'you' is intact, and there's an injury elsewhere preventing your functioning, then this is great. But if it isn't, then it seems like you just get brand new brain tissue, with none of the information that was previously stored in it, so that the 'revived' patients are less like Lazarus and more like Terry Schiavo, or, best case, an infant.
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.
Worst case is IMHO that a new person will be created in an old and damaged body.
How would you tell, what would this "new person" theory predict differently then the old person theory?
How plausible that is depends, I think, on what you mean by "person".
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?
I first wrote the quote below first. I'm not so sure now. Maybe some personality is basically damage.