Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create “spare” bodies, both human and nonhuman.
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People lose their consciousness when you take off their brains, yeah. I guess other parts of the nervous system don’t contribute to consciousness but the more I think about it the more I wonder how they can take out only the part that thinks (not to mention being 100% certain that it doesn’t develop at any point).
Idk there’s some evidence that nerves in your body can contribute to cognition beyond just pain reception and so on
In the standard view, people think its just some pattern of neurons in your forebrain and maybe some memories that makes you you. But all the neuron shit is important, all those glial cells, we keep learning more about the gut-brain axis, we don’t have any examples of minds without bodies.
Without even getting into philosophy of mind and that we don’t have an empirical definition of consciousness, so it’s impossible to tell for sure one of the clones is conscious or not, neuroscience doesn’t know for sure the anstomical boundaries of consciousness, either. As others have said, there seems to be more to perception and cognition than only brain matter.