Post #2875723

2026-05-26 19:08 UTC

This reminds me of the research I’ve read on people with a split brain - people who have gotten their corpus collosum severed in order to treat severe epilepsy and ended up with two independent but functional brains controlling parts of their body or different functions. From what I remember (and I’m too lazy to find and cite a source, so please correct me if I’m wrong) they ended up not only having half of their bodies controlled separately, but some speech functions and communication abilities were also split. So for example, if they saw something with their left eye only they wouldn’t be able to identify it speaking out loud but their left hand would be able to write the name of the item. I almost definitely got the pop science oversimplification of this, but the relevant takeaway is that the human brain is really complicated and resilient. If each half can independently develop the ability to replicate motor functions and some communication and reading/writing, then it seems like at best wishful thinking to assume that it’s possible to consistently engineer a human body that’s just alive enough to keep the biological machinery functioning but not alive enough to merit even the moral consideration of a farm animal. In turn I’m reminded of House of the Scorpion which tells the story of Matteo Alacrán, who was born and grew up in relative luxury on an opium plantation staffed by neurologically neutered slaves, including clones. Matteo himself is eventually revealed to be the latest clone of the patriarch of this whole enterprise and the decision to let him actually live a good life up until it’s time to kill him and take his organs is a kind of twisted kindness on his part. But compared to the actual rationalist plan, the Alacrán method at least treats everyone like a disposable resource used to further the goals and whims of the ruling sociopath. Matteo is treated as a person, is what I’m saying. Congratulations to the life extension weirdos for making the sociopathic drug lord ruler of a literal YA dystopia novel seem like they have an actual point.

Replies (3)

@Rozzychan@fandom.ink 2026-05-26 19:31

@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems @BioMan@awful.systems Here is more on split brains if you are curious. I found this game interesting. The Split Brain Experiments https://educationalgames.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/split-brain/index.php

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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-05-26 20:05

not alive enough to merit even the moral consideration of a farm animal I foresee a rise in gourmet cannibalism to try to recoup at least some of the cost of keeping the meatbags alive and healthy for 30-some years

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@BioMan@awful.systems 2026-05-26 20:21

Putting aside the sneering and philosophy to nerd for a minute, before getting back to it. For a long time people were very into the split-consciousness notion of what happened to split-brain people, but a couple things have come around and now some people really think that the better way of thinking of it is still-unitary consciousness with a very difficult time moving around information between different sensory/expression modalities. First, you get people who are born without a corpus callosum who are behaviorally normal (www.tandfonline.com/doi/…/13554794.2013.826690). They get a bit of extra connectivity sidways through their deep brain structure as some kind of homeostatic compensation, but the total amount is definitely low. What this says is there’s a difference between a brain that grew under a very unusual set of structural constraints, and one that grew normally that gets shredded. Similar with those people you find now and then with a brain that’s 90% fluid (though with the actual cortex pushed up against the skull around a big bubble of CSF) and the only neurological findings are things like weakness in one leg and an IQ of 80 (worth noting that this is still very very different from hydranencephaly) (www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/…/fulltext). Second, when you do a wider range of experiments with the split brain people you find that while they cannot verbally say what is in their left visual field (which goes to the right side, while language is usually a left-side phenomenon) they can reliably state that something is there with speech, or either hand, and approximately where in the visual field it is. The low bandwidth awareness of presence is there, but they cannot get their speech capacity to access the details. It’s like their sight is now multiple separate sensory modalities, some of which is very difficult to talk about and some of which are very difficult to draw with particular hands. uva.nl/…/split-brain-does-not-lead-to-split-consc… academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/5/…/2951052 People argue a lot about what this means www.sciencedirect.com/…/S0028393221002402 You can also apparently reorganize around very small amounts of remaining fibers to have no deficits like that, with no issues talking about anything in either part of the visual field news.ucsb.edu/…/new-findings-split-brain-science-… Now, getting out of the nerd mode, there’s a LOT of weird literature from the 60s to 80s about people with very strange brain anatomy who nonetheless developed normally or better than expected …wiley.com/…/j.1469-8749.1965.tb07839.x “Two cases of hydranencephaly are described in infants. In both these there was evidence of excessive intracranial pressure-as is often the case-and both were operated on to relieve this. The progress of the older child, now 21 months of age, was throughout excellent physically and mentally, and he is considered to be normal. The progress of the second infant was remarkably good for three months, but thereafter mental retardation and spasticity followed; he was also blind. There is no good explanation for the unexpectedly good progress of the first patient.” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.7434023 …the most severe group, in which ventricle expansion fills 95 percent of the cranium. Many of the individuals in this last group, which forms just less than 10 percent of the total sample, are severely disabled, but half of them have IQ’s greater than 100. This group provides some of the most dramatic examples of apparent ly normal function against all odds. Commenting on Lorber’s work, Kenneth Till, a former neurosurgeon at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, London, has this to say: “Interpreting brain scans can be very tricky. There can be a great deal more brain tissue in the cranium than is immediately apparent.” Till echoes the cautions of many practitioners when he says, "Lorber may be being rather overdramatic when he says that someone has ‘virtually no brain.’ " Anybody ever read the short story “Cutie” by Greg Egan? Very apropos…

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