Doctors gone mad

There has been some discussion in the press recently of the proposals of some doctor to perform a head transplant. I thought that the discussion was for real, not someone's idea of a joke. I share a few thoughts.

It is just about plausible that you could connect a head to a new power supply and to a new waste disposal system, in particular to a new blood supply.

But it is not plausible at all that you could connect a head to a new peripheral nervous system in a new body, that is to say to a new spinal cord and to new cranial nerves, at least those ones which serve the body rather than the head itself. And even supposing some magic was worked and all the millions of connections were re-established, what about the rather abrupt change in the signals going across all those connections? Won't the brain in this head just go into some kind of terminal melt-down? Followed shortly afterwards by terminal melt-down of its new body?

Organ rejection is no doubt another problem. Last but not least there are ethics.

A thought experiment about keeping a brain alive in a vat has been going the academic rounds for some time and I dare say that if you could do the one thing you would be quite a long way towards doing the other. So for a discussion of what might be involved in doing a vat, see reference 1.

In the meantime, I wonder about the medical governance of a country which allows one if its doctors to talk in a serious way about such a thing.

Reference 1: Embodiment or envatment: Reflections on the bodily basis of consciousness - Diego Cosmelli and Evan Thompson - 2010.