I really, really, REALLY suspect that the donor in this case did not realise his brain would be resurrected and tortured. We have no way of knowing this isn’t the worst torture ever inflicted, all on a nonconsenting person.
I’mma go update my will to say my body specifically should not be donated to science. Cremation please. Jesus.
Friendly reminder to not be an organ donor in
do organ donation but only to other patients, never donate your body to any cause because it’ll end up in an israeli artillery range
Without people donating their bodies we would have no doctors.
then the US medical boards better get their shit together and stop giving people’s bodies to the military.
Yeah, I’m not against the idea in general. Just the idea of more shareholder value being extracted from me after my death or being used to fuel the military industrial complex or some shitty AI research sucks.
Organ donation is necessary and good. Donating your body to science gets iffy because so many creeps have latched on to that system but is still on the whole very good.
Why? The way the article reads, this is good work that could lead to helping a lot of folks. Also, being an organ donor here is not the same as donated to science. Also this skips the largely useless use of nonhuman animals as test subjects, sparing at least some suffering by an unconsenting party.
Fuck this country, for sure, but man don’t shit on science that can do real good.
There’s been a lot of shady shit related to the organ donations the past few years, as well.
Come on dude. At least link to like that time they blew uo someone’s grandma “for alzheimers research.” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49198405
That’s a different system.
Yeah the system thats relevant for the article linked. Donating your body to science. What’s more it’s straightforwardly something that can be fixed. People having their bodies be used in ways that they did not consent to based on a deceptive system.
Donating your body for organ transplantation is unquestionably a moral good. Even with individual or even systemic problems.
People can always question morality because it’s arbitrary. What is unquestionable is that there is overall social benefit as a result of saving lives and improving health.
The article says that they caught the mistaken death pronouncement and stopped before ever starting to try to harvest any pieces. What’s shady? Mistakes happen because nobody is perfect.
If you aren’t a registered donor then you should not be considered for receiving a donated organ, exceptions made for children maybe since they might grow up to not be selfish. Be willing to give or intelligible to receive. That’s fair.
I’m on the pro-donation side (how is this an argument outside of religious exemptions?), but:
If you aren’t a registered donor then you should not be considered for receiving a donated organ, exceptions made for children maybe since they might grow up to not be selfish. Be willing to give or intelligible to receive. That’s fair.
This is not a productive way of running things. What you are arguing for is functionally killing people for not donating their organs. You may object that they are functionally killing people as well, and I agree, but that doesn’t make killing them the best course of action for society, just like we shouldn’t just be executing people even if they literally committed murder. It’s social-contract-theory-style moralism that just assumes that discarding the personhood of people who break the contract and killing them in cold blood produces a better society, but we shouldn’t be “just assuming” a positive outcome for a plan of systematically killing people, which again is your position.
no, it’s prioritizing people who engage in a specific pro-social behavior over those who don’t. triage isn’t functionally killing anyone.
It’s an arbitrary “eye for an eye” framing of a very specific antisocial choice that doesn’t even need to exist in society. I would encourage you to also see their later reply (the most recent at time of writing) to understand where this is coming from.
from a view from nowhere policy point of view i think it’s reasonable to prioritize registered donors over non-donors. no moralism about it.
I am not opposed to ending some lives. Murderers, rapists, the greedy who oppress us, folks who hurt children, I see no reason to continue allowing them to breathe our air. If I killed someone unlawfully I would expect to be executed for that crime. If someone is trying to kill me I am absolutely going to try to kill them. If I were not an organ donor, which I am, I would not expect to be eligible for someone else’s organs. This is not hard. Humanity has gotten entirely too comfortable in its belief that it is better than the rest of the animals. We are not.
You’re just re-asserting moralism and the discarding of personhood without justifying it in terms of how it improves society more than the alternative. My problem wasn’t that you reached the conclusion of systematically killing people, my problem is that you have no real argument to support that conclusion.
Obviously, I have no problem with revolutionary violence, and sometimes the only way to stop an ongoing violent crime for the sake of everyone else’s safety is to shoot the perpetrator (and those are functionally the same question), but when you have a massive volume of resources at your disposal and the perpetrator is safely contained, you rarely actually have good reason to kill them. There is much greater social benefit to understanding that they are still a person and can become better, though in some cases it would certainly be more reasonable to keep them away from broader society for the rest of their lives (maybe with occasional directly-monitored and controlled exceptions).
And let us not lose sight of that that’s a wildly more extreme case than the non-organ-donor, who again is still a person and whose life still has value even if they are seriously negligent and incorrect on this issue (which I agree that they are).
The thing that really gets me about this kind of thinking is that if you’re just stipulating laws, why not stipulate that there should be no choice but to “donate” (outside of religious exemptions, if you’ll grant that). You have before you a very obvious option for saving lives and also not socially murdering people and instead you pick the option that saves fewer lives and systematically kills people in addition. It’s very characteristic of social contract thinking, in my experience.
Also I fail to see the point you’re making about animals. Animals should be rehabilitated too in the cases where such a question even applies.
(“Donate” was in quotes because at that point it’s basically a tax, not donation, but I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. It would be better to have a democratic system of “taxation” with whatever carveouts rather than the current system of donation.)
I suppose I will start at the top. I have no argument for my opinion. Nope. On this I consider myself objectively correct. There’s almost never just one person in need of any given organ when one becomes available. If one who does is a listed donor and one who isn’t both need the same, say, heart, who do you think should get it, because to me there is no question. But put 'em on the list, just always at the back if a donor goes on the list even after them. A concession for your moral dilemma. Folks with religious reasons not to give organs probably also would not take one for the same reason and don’t even enter the equation.
Also, personhood is horseshit. You are no more a person than my cat, nor am I. I have no doubt that you are both sentient, capable of love and hate, and possess a sense of self. Person is just a word humans gave themselves to feel less like animals. Nah. You’re an animal and that’s a beautiful thing.
We are of an accord on violence to overthrow tyranny that may result in a number of deaths , or in the killing of someone doing a mass shooting or such. Where we disagree is the keeping of captured murderers, rapists, child abusers alive to rehabilitate them. They have already removed themselves from society by breaking such cardinal laws and should be culled, there is no benefit from saving them. It doesn’t return or un-harm their victims. Every other social species absolutely will kill, or ostracize (which is as good as killing) the ones that make it worse for everyone. Nature has it right. Man just thinks he’s fancier than that.
I think I touched on all of your points. I don’t claim to know everything. I just see things how I do.
That was 1 example. Feel free to go hunt down more. There’s plenty out there.
Your one example does not provide evidence for the skepticism you want to justify… If there’s plenty out there, it would would seem easy enough for you (the one making the claim) to provide a clear cut example, and preferably even an article that mentions a wider problem, to prove the point.
This kind of lazy “look it up I’m obviously right” in the face of push back as tepid as reading the article YOU linked would get you dunked on if you were a lost Liberal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/us/kentucky-organ-donations.html
Go wild with it. I really don’t feel like having to rehash the conversation that pops up a couple times a year anyway when some lib comes in complaining about falun gong claims and we gotta go into how it’s projection of what Israel does to Palestinians and the US does to their poor.
Wait this has the same issue. Not a single person who shouldn’t have had their organs removed had their organs removed as per the article. Subjecting people to this is still beyond the pale though, and it shows nonprofit having a skewed incentive structure. But pat_riot’s objections are just as valid here.
Keep that article on standby instead, then. Simple enough.
Im not entirely convinced by tbe efficacy of this. Especially because their plans is to prod the brains ubtil they have enough data to use AI models.
Thankfully science is not dependent upon your being convinced. I’m not thrilled about AI use either, but if used right it’s just another available tool. This is still valuable research that is not using nonhuman animals to try to learn things about humans.
The issue is not a moral one concerning ai in research, the issue is that I simply do not believe current machine learning technology is capable of creating a functioning full brain simulator which can accurately model the interaction of the entire cns and its interaction with theoretical drugs.
That simply sounds like Theranos to me. AIVCs are at a “That might be possible in future” stage, and this proposes to model billions of them and their incredibly complex interactions.
Well, that might be possible in the future never is if no work is done to make it so,and if we learn things we can use now then the research is still valuable. I think what they’re doing is neat and would absolutely want my brain used like this once I no longer need it.
The problem with your argument here is that these people are not working on improving machine intelligence. They’re working on a model that requires the tech to be more advanced than it is (At least as far as I understand it).
It smells like Theranos to me, I’m sorry.
Well, that might be possible in the future never is if no work is done to make it so
you’re smuggling in an assumption that this work done today will be of value to the future people, which is not automatically the case. we already have examples of that with experiments prior to 1950 that were already not up to the standards of data collection by the 1980s.
we’re really bad at brain stuff in particular and i think it’s more likely the more capable future people will, at best, have to re-do all of this work from scratch.
Do nothing! Wait for the future people! Horseshit
you can’t take your organs with you
Toss em in the trash and let a big birb munch on my microplastics
The torment nexus meme is overused BUT THEY KEEP INVENTING IT
Nope. No. Fuck that. That is the kind of thing that makes my skin crawl. Do not mess with brains. We don’t know enough yet to ethically mess with brains in that way
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.
There’s no way we know enough about brains to know that for sure
Car adds that because the brains lack electrical activity, they may not indicate whether a drug will cause seizures, although the company plans to eventually remove the anesthesia from some brain slices. Car says other models can fill in the gaps.
FUCK YOUUUUU
ethicists
Zero trust in American, British, German, or French ethicists; zero trust in ethicists from pro-Israel\colonial nations
Ethicist, especially bioethicist, is a job yhat specifically involves justifying experiments. You don’t hire an in-house ethicist to tell you no.
So basically the scientific equivalent of Western journalism
Car adds that because the brains lack electrical activity, they may not indicate whether a drug will cause seizures, although the company plans to eventually remove the anesthesia from some brain slices. Car says other models can fill in the gaps.
that’s nice
Listen if you cant experiment on a post morten “Brain slice” with no electrical activity you just can’t touch neurons period.
Torment Nexus type beat. This feels like an artifact of the old idea that the brain stands alone from the body somehow when in fact the neural system is highly integrated with every other part of the body. That shit from the other day about how adjusting the gut microbiome can reduce psychological symptoms of autism for instance. What are we actually gaining by dosing nonfunctional brains with mystery drugs?
??? There’s like seventy different ways this could be useful. You can tell if a drug is absorbed by the right parts of the brain, how long a drug stays in neural tissue, and just have a better result for the same kinds of tests you would get from neural tissue testing.
What’s more suspect is that this is an ai tech startup.
With our research on disembodied human brains and the impacts of various psychoactive chemicals on its functioning, we’ve trained a neural-network that can help us align our AI models in such a way that induce similar levels of psychoactivity simply through active engagement with our large language models.
Step away from the lathe
Just try and stop me!
Torment Nexus type beat.
there’s no physical or biological reason to think a standalone brain is conscious of anything. by the time we’re scooping a brain out of a skull the processes that make someone a person are long gone and this isn’t much different from hooking electrodes up to muscle tissue.
This sounds absolutely horrific. We should do it to billionaires’ brains.
nah
Look I’m all for science and modern medicine, but there is absolutely no fucking way that I would trust anything from a biotech startup in the USA. There’s absolutely no safeguards in place to prevent these people from doing the most depraved shit for a buck. Same reason I’m so leery of organ donation in the USA, these ghoulish companies will destroy hospitals for profit, you think they’re not itching to rip your organs out as soon as possible to make even more money? I get it, organ donation is objectively good. Don’t get mad at me, get mad at our insane capitalist hellscape.
Do you want zombies? because this is how you get zombies!
Science is Satan’s most depraved creation
You need to read the book again. Satan doesn’t create anything. In fact, if you pay attention, he’s one of the good guys in the story. Tried to unionize the angels, gets cast into hell for it. Helps the stupid humans see the reality of their existence and place in the world. God, on the other hand, kills lots of people, tortures a few more, has his own kid killed as a bug patch to the shitty code he wrote to start with, after constantly acting like a spoiled kid who keeps losing the game he made the rules for and takes his ball home.
But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!
-George Carlin, RIP
has his own kid killed as a bug patch to the shitty code he wrote to start with
Satan works for God. For instance, in the book of Job it’s pretty clear Satan works for God. Or in the desert, Satan is sent (by God) to tempt christ.
They are on the same team. If you pick Satan over God, you’re just be sheep dogged
So you’re okay with another 4 years of God? Have you ever heard of harm reduction?
Oh, I don’t pick either. I think your fairytale is ridiculous. I’m just familiar with it due to my upbringing. Your god is a narcissistic dick, and I’ll have no truck with him. You choose to be a sheep and that’s sad.
I don’t believe in God either, but you were making cringey middle school argument for being an edgy Satanist. It’s childish
Nope, made no argument for that at all. Worshipping anything is fucking silly, except maybe the cat, he seems to expect it.
As Jesus Christ once said: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
If you need the threat of hell or the reward of heaven to be good in this life, then you aren’t good.
I’m gonna let Thomas Aquinas answer that for me:
I live my life a quarter mile at a time. Nothing else matters: not the mortgage, not the store, not my team and all their bullshit.
That’s quite the non sequitur you have there
nice ad hominem
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
- Saint Paul the Apostle
You don’t know what that means, do you?
man that’s not what ad hominem means. we deserve a higher quality clowning
