Working With Human Brains I am not a scientist, and yet I was able to predict something which I think is horrible and that is the possibility of the tiny human brains that are being grown in labs could become sentient. It took a while, but scientists are beginning to feel this could be a problem. Even though these brains are tiny, they have started to develop in ways which the scientists never thought of. Can you imagine a brain which can feel and think and has no body? But things don’t end here. A couple of years ago a scientist proposed an experiment which was thought to be insane. It had to do with human brains. He worked in a very prestigious university and didn’t even tell his supervisors there what he was thinking. He was ordering slices of human brains to experiment on. He had managed to keep cells alive from the area of the human brain that was responsible for thinking, speech and motor function. He wanted to bring brains back to life. While this might be a way to find cures for diseases of the brain, is it ethical to restore certain functions to a brain which could then be suffering? A lecturer gave a speech on ethics concerning these experiments and said reanimating dead brains could be a living hell for the brain. There’s been a lot of talk lately about uploading our brains to computers. Apparently, there are some scientists who think this would mean it would actually be us in the computer. I personally don’t believe this, what I think would be in the computer would be a digital copy of us at best. While it might fool some people into thinking we were really in there, and it could preserve our lives forever, I think it would be more like an electronic clone. Having said this the electronic copy may think it is the same person because it wouldn’t know any better since it had all the same memories and such. Sometimes what happens is scientists get too preoccupied with trying to live forever when they would be much better off trying to solve diseases which might accomplish the same thing naturally. If we lived in an environment with 10 diseases and where aging, which is considered a disease nowadays, could be conquered it would be possible to live a very long time, we might even have the possibility of becoming eternal. The question really comes down to would we want to live forever? Most people will say right off the bat yes, but before this answer should be made a lot of thought should be given. One of the first questions to ask is how would living forever affect our brains? Perhaps we were not programmed for that type of life and maybe the strain of everyday living going on eternally would cause most of us to eventually become mentally ill. One has to wonder how the advent of the quantum computer will affect brain research? Since these computers are far more powerful than the digital computers we use today, we have to expect a lot more scientific breakthroughs. I recently heard about an experiment which would take a digital super computer 100 years to solve being solved by a current quantum computer in five minutes. If we would apply these computers to the research going on with human brains, we might be able to accomplish the same goals without actually having to try to restore pieces of human brains to life. I think doing that is a very bad idea. How would anybody like it if they died and then were brought back to incredible suffering? It may turn out that quantum computers will be able to create artificial human brains which rival the real thing. We may be on the verge of creating sentient life. The quantum computers we have today are nowhere near as powerful as the ones we are going to have in the future even though they are far more powerful than any digital computer. We see experiments being created in many different places where animal brains have been partially restored after the animal has died. One scientist reported he was able to get the neurons to fire in a dead pig brain. Some scientists are reporting that even though we thought brains start to decompose immediately after death that may not be the end for them and they may be able to be restored. This was proven when several heads from decapitated pigs which had died hours ago showed signs of brain activity. The scientists had collective heads from a slaughterhouse and then infused them with nutrients and protective chemicals using special pumps that acted like the heart. This restored blood to the vessels and according to an article reinstated their ability to consume sugar and oxygen and then the neurons began to fire. Even the scientists were astounded. This may indicate another way of preserving humans after death. We all know there are some people who refuse to accept death and have had their bodies frozen. Soon they might have the opportunity to keep their brains from degrading and be put into some kind of permanent sleep until a cure can be found for what killed them. On the other hand, this might not turn out to be such a good thing for them. Who knows what terrors they might face while they are stored in some kind of tube? Trying to preserve their brain might cause them terrors that we can’t even understand at this point. It could turn out one would be better off dead and even if they came out of the tube hundreds of years from now, they might be so mentally ill no one could help them. I realize brain research is very important. I also realize it is one of the branches of science where ethics has to apply. Long ago we realized it was wrong to operate on prisoners and captured soldiers just to study how their insides worked. Sure, that may have been helpful but it was inhuman to do. What is so different about bringing human brains back to life so that you can study them and possibly cut them apart again? There has to be ethics apply to this discipline. As far as I’m concerned it is even wrong to do this to animals, but I know a lot of scientists would scoff at that. Perhaps we will be able to create a facsimile human brain on our quantum computers and work with it and that will solve this problem entirely.
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