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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If you can do a whole body, couldn’t you just do the part you need? Why make a fully human form without humanity. Just’s seems pretty sus. Also doing this under capitalism will be a horror show. If this was a state owned enterprise in China growing organs, much less to quibble about.
It’s hard to say, since despite the article’s vague assertion that the technology is nearing, this is still purely speculative science fiction. What’s keeping the organ alive and growing? It needs some sort of life support system. The only existing life support system we have for organs is the rest of the body. The alternative is… some sort of organ scaffold in a nutrient bath? Who knows, either way we’re making up technologies.
Also a whole body allows a whole body transplant (brain transplant) which, while often overkill, would work on most things. (Brain transplants aren’t possible yet, but scientists are working on that one, and I’d bet it’s doable before growing a body is.)
Would be kinda dope to get a biologically compatible vagina out of this but I can tell you it’d be sure freaky to see the body you’re going to get implanted in
have you seen “Infinity Pool”? It’s not really about that exact concept, but something along those lines
not a plot spoiler, just a thematic spoiler
what if you could get a ethics transplant (kind of the liberal wet dream — a little flesh puppet that can carry your sins so you can freely engage in consequence-free hedonism)
https://hexbear.net/comment/6005892
“Just seems pretty sus” isn’t a good reason by itself not to do something.
“Couldn’t you just do the part you need?”
Maybe, if the goal is a transplant or something. But if we’re trying to have a long-term testing platform, human bodies are complex interdependent systems. Let’s say you want to test a blood pressure medication for example. You can’t have just a heart and veins, you also need lungs, kidneys, and a liver to see how the medication affects related organs and gets processed. Then you’d also need soft tissue and muscle surrounding that set up to stimulate the actual environment those organs would be housed in. At that point we’re talking about pretty much an entire body anyway, which is exactly why we test things on animals (problematic) and “volunteers” (super problematic under capitalism, great risk of harm even under some other system), you know, things with bodies.
Moving from vitro testing to animal testing is a very long process, and moving from animal testing to human testing is even longer. Important medications spend years if not decades in safety testing when they could be potentially saving human lives or massively improving them much sooner than that if we had some spare bodies around to test on which did not have the usual moral concerns or full moral status. Even if the drugs don’t all work, immediately being able to test them on a human body and realizing it causes intolerable side effects or harm or is just plain ineffectual, it saves us the labor and resources trying to continue to develop it or test it and researchers can move on to other options much faster.
I won’t engage on arguments about fictional technology feasibility in this case. But let’s talk about a full body without consciousness. If it is a fully formed and functional body, it has to have a nervous system. So it has to have some organ to regulate all the various functions that are coordinated by a nervous system. So basically this is a “animal person” following this logic. It wouldn’t have enough brain for “human consciousness” by design. So how is this significantly different from live animal for testing? Only the animal is “more human bit still animal”. This just gets pretty thorny as a thought experiment.
This is simply not a good situation to have thought experiments about. The conclusion is purely based on how generous your assumptions are: any other mammal is conscious, just not sapient, so even that makes your thought experiment faulty. But the issue is that any set of assumptions will completely determine your verdict and there isn’t really even that much meat to the scenario outside of the assumptions: if it was possible to just make a piece of meat that is biologically compatible with human beings, great; if the piece of meat is stated to have the quality of being sentient by the premise, then not so great.
A nervous system doesn’t necessarily imply sentience. Someone who is brain dead but on life support has a nervous system, yet no activity will be registered in the brain no matter what kind of stimulus happens to the body. One might bicker about it being impossible to know whether a brain dead person has any kind of qualia, but I’m pretty doubtful and think it’s reasonable to assume they don’t based on the evidence available. Hell, while we’re on the topic let’s just shift our hypothetical a little bit.
What if someone volunteered to donate their body to science after their death OR brain death. A terrible tragedy happens, and they do indeed wind up brain dead. The will is solid and a research institution (for the sake of argument, we will stipulate a morally sound institution) wants to keep that body on life support and use it for medical testing purposes to avoid having to test on animals or fully conscious and sentient humans. Assuming the person made such a donation in good health and a sound state of mind, I don’t see anything wrong with this. The family might object based on sentimental attachments to the body and the person the body used to be, but without a functional brain I don’t really think we’re talking about a “person” anymore, not morally speaking. Much closer to a corpse than a person in my opinion.
Having a human body grown without consciousness, sentience, or a social identity/connection at all overcomes any kind of remaining sentimentalist objections. If we accept that someone can donate their body and organs to science or other people upon their death/brain death, I think it follows that we can permit non-conscious and non-sentient bodies in general to be used for such purposes. Again, as long as the body is grown expressly without those things, I don’t see a coherent argument against it.
That’s the tricky bit, how and where does this determination get made? A lot of people believe many animals are non-sentient even if there is strong evidence otherwise. I just think it is pretty fraught territory based on a hypothetical, which is kinda like a rocko’s basilisk thing to me.
Maybe the organs would function better as part of a whole body
Next gen crash test dummies