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When I had my ear surgery about 20 years ago, the doctor explained to me that I would be awake for part of the procedure, but the anesthesia meant that I would have no memory of it.¹ It’s a weird thing to think about whether that lack of memory would obviate the pain or discomfort of the moment.

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1. As it turned out, I was so frightened in the lead-up to the surgery that they had to do general anesthesia on me because I was shaking too much for them to operate so I was unconscious for the whole thing.

From the article:

> 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.

It's still an open debate whether the seat of consciousness (or even simpler, perception) is the brain.

see e.g. Wahbeh, H., Radin, D., Cannard, C., & Delorme, A. (2022). What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain? Observational and empirical challenges to materialistic models. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 955594. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.955594

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

Same for memory, which is "needed" as well for your question to make sense. The more current theories assume memories are stored not only in the brain, but throughout the body.

see e.g. Repetto, C., & Riva, G. (2023). The neuroscience of body memory: Recent findings and conceptual advances. EXCLI journal, 22, 191–206. https://doi.org/10.17179/excli2023-5877

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_memory

> Live dissection and experimentation on “alive but drugged” human brains is mental.

There’s no such thing as live dissection. It’s vivisection.

Well, we know how to make living brains insensate - that's who we all make it through surgery.

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.

It's not a great article, and it glosses over the reality that if you hooked this brain up to an EEG it would show unequivocal brain death. CELLS of the brain are alive, but in terms of being able to function in any sort of coordinated way there that ship sailed minutes after the person who donated their organs died. The wave of depolarization that marks brain death isn't something we can reverse, and what's being done here is all about metabolism and structure rather than those much more subtle functions.

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.

Reminds me of a certain scene from Knausgård's Morning Star.

The word "alive" is doing a lot of work here. A brain is pretty much permanently fried after five to fifteen minutes without oxygen, and these are donor brains, not some emergency brain extraction team, so the timeframe will be much longer than that. There might be 'life' left in there in the technical sense, but there's no 'person' left.

I’ll volunteer to waive my rights here. Feel free to do whatever you wish with my brain once it’s detached from my body :)

Can’t be worse than my organs being harvested for donation.

Brain does not have physical feelings, and with all other feelings cut off and not possible, even with consciousness it won’t be a horror scenario like in MetallicA’s “One”.

Give credit where credit is due: Descartes, Kant, Putnam, etc.

Dude we can't revive brains minutes after cardiac arrest, when they're inside their bodies, even when we're TRYING TO DO SO. You can think about "what if" if you like the though experiment, but seriously arguing that there's any way that brains could recover consciousness the next day because you gave them nutrients is like arguing that voyager could crash back on earth and injure someone after being flung backwards around a loose interstellar body.

This provides humanity with a greater good than gambling

The Dust Theory in Permutation City by Greg Egan pushes the concept to bizarre levels.

It looks like the families have to agree to do this, before your brain can be donated:

> 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.

Is this dry humor and/or a deliberate attempt to make the reader even more horrified by the experiment? Or only a different sensibility from mine? No judgement. I just really can't tell.

And yet, "my child is alive" versus "my child is dead" have some… meaning.

With what we are learning about how gut flora, can a brain be considered conscious while detached from the digestive system?

We don't create the torment nexus, we are creating all the possible torment nexuses

This is precisely why I've never been interested in being an organ donor.

I don't remember where specifically I learned this, but I was taught that tissue has to be alive to be useful, so they harvest it when you're almost-dead. Having my last moments be being literally dismembered is not something I wish for my future self.

To some extent, volunteering for any sort of medical study is signing up to be tortured in the hopes that someone down the line might be saved by the research. Most cancer treatments, for instance, are objectively terrible to go through, and when you're testing and developing the protocols you're pumping already sick people full of poisons and hoping for the best.

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.