You’ve seen instances of quadruple amputees, people losing their lower half and instestines, etc. After playing a bit of Deus Ex I started wondering exactly how much of a person needs to exist for them to survive (not talking quality of life, but just enough to communicate intelligently). How far could you do it with only natural parts and then how far could you go with artificial parts too?
There are a great many politicians who only appear to be the arsehole (with no other redeeming features) and remain alive.
It really depends what you mean by survive.
You could do ECMO and dialysis and get rid of the heart, lungs and kidneys, parenteral nutrition to feed via an IV so no need for a gut.
The patient would be bed bound and at immediate risk of dying from a complication but in theory that’s basically an empty abdominal cavity connected to a brain and a bunch of machines.
You would need enough decent sized blood vessels left to connect it all up but otherwise not much physically.
That’s basically exactly what I was getting at. So theoretically, at least with machines, you would only need your head to survive.
Maybe, you’d want to talk to someone like an intensive care doctor really but yeah a lot of your organs can be replaced mechanically these days at least for a while.
Can they really replace the liver and the kidney long term? That would be news to me.
On constant dialysis that you never get unhooked from, I don’t see why not.
If you can just pipe nutrient-rich blood into the brain directly you can probably bypass the entire digestive system. That takes care of the liver, and with the only waste products coming from the body being whatever the brain produces, that should be a pretty light workload for an artificial kidney.
I think dialysis damages the blood from what a web search suggests to me, so I doubt that would work non-stop.
I like science fiction so I find this interesting. I’m not qualified to answer, but while the skull is probably needed, probably not eyes and nose and jaw 🫥 right? And beyond that just neck to connect things and to swallow liquid food, and some parts of the torso. I guess the question then remains how much of the torso.
Then we start getting into philosophy on self and also how much machine assistance is allowed. If you can provide nutrition and oxygen to the brain, you could probably be a brain in a jar and still count.
While true, I assumed we’re talking current day technology!
That’s the way I see it. We’re brains, and everything else is support
It certainly looks nervous
The book Johnny Got His Gun kind of answers this question. In the book, a WWI soldier gets blown up by an artillery shell and wakes up in a hospital missing most of his body. He has lost his arms, legs, nose, mouth, eyes, and ears.
In the end he learns he can communicate with a nurse by tapping his head in Morse code. So it would seem as long as you could move you head with your neck, you can still communicate with others.
I'm the boss, this is champagne, merry ChristmasNow I have this stuck in my head again
Good news, everyone!
There’s actually a podcast episode on this! One co-host’s Matt Parker, if you know who that is.
