Being A Head Without A Body?

[joey11223]

I;m not sure if asnyone watched this, but recently on an episode of bodyshock there was a girl with a condition where you have another head attached to yours and that head has a small shiveled body with no limbs or organs. Technically there are siamese twins but it'a so rare it has its own name. Anyway while i was watching it a thought occured, while she was totally normal, that other head growing from the top of her head only had a blood supply yet it was consious. It had a ribcage in its mass of flesh below its neck but within it were no organs, so no lungs. The reason we have lungs is to get oxygen for our blood, if we could have oxygenated blood given to us, we wouldnt need them, like she didnt because a section of her brain was attached to her complete sister, and she was taking her blood. After finding out about such operations as the head swapping of those two monkeys in the 70's i think, and thw Russian scientist who claimed to have kept a dogs head alive with a simple blood pumping machine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_i...al_of_Organisms Even though they assumed his claims were false, i dont understand why he couldn;t have been telling the truth. As we saw from bodyshock, that other head had its own consiousness, it was a seperate being, but it was attached to another body, which was supplying it with blood, which allowed it to survive. So if someone is dieing from say a heartattack, i don't understand why the head cannot be carefully severed from the body, each severed blood vessel and artery being attached to a blood pumping machine. Sure it would be a very comlex operation, but in the case of attaching that monkeys head to another headless body showed, nerve and blood vessel connection one by one works. So i was thinking, if in a few years time this operation does begin to occur, will anyone want to do it? We have all seen heads in jars in futurama( an example ), but would you want to be one. You would be fully consious, you would have all your senses, but you would be confined to the jar. You would have to placed in some kind of nutritional based liquid to provice you with moisture and minerals you would get from eating, which you can no longer do. Interestly enough your mouth would be full of water, but you wouldnt be drowning as you no longer breathed. You wouldn't be able to talk or make any sound. You would be able to move your eyes around but that would be about it. Of course your brain could be linked with a computer so you could talk( which i believe already has had success), and i suppose you could actually be giving a robotic body and limbs, the robotic spinal cord would attach to your brain is it does now. Obviously the false body is beyond us at the moment, though i doubt that will be for long. In conclusion, can this actually be done?( i dont see why not, since oxygenated blood is all we need) and if so, would you ever go through with it to continue living after your body fails you? Lol this may be the random rmablings of a 16 yr old, but hey, i think its really interesting

[wasup]

I wouldn't mind a robot body. In fact, I'd love my head to be attached to a robot. How badass would that be? Imagine the halloween opportunities

[Descensus]

We could be like Nixon on Futurama .

[metcalfracing]

That is sick... that poor dog... I watch the video, and I'm about ready for a second cold war. Edit:

[juroara]

have you seen the andriods the japanese have made? I dont think a robotic body would be impossible. the lady androids walk around on their own just fine, and have an acceptable appearance. I would say life like, but its not. real people have bigger pores and hair. . . .

[joey11223]

That is sick... that poor dog... I watch the video, and I'm about ready for a second cold war. Edit: [/b] You know, even though for the dog its bad, i think we are becoming to concerned with the negative aspects of medical experiments. I know it's horrible but you have to remember, withoutsuch tests, new discoveries just arn't possible. Like before anesthetic, peoples legs got sawed off when they were awake. Now we have asenthetic, im sure it was tested like mad, people pumped full of it until their hearts stopped, people not given enough etc. For those test subjects( in this case a dog) its horrible, but because of their sacrifice we now know how to give anesthetic and use it to save millions of people.

[metcalfracing]

I still say, those experiments was highly unethical. They didn't do this research for curing people... neither did we, at that time... both sides did these experiments so that they could make Democracy/communism look better than the opposite. All our advances. of this time, came out of our need to beat communism is the world's largest popularity contest. For us, it was all looking good, so that other nations wouldn't turn to communism.

[joey11223]

well we still got those advances didn't we. Anyway i thought Gods aloud us full reign over all the animals in the world, if we use some of them for experiemnts that could improve our race, then surely thats allowed. Anyway it's survival of the fittest, doing those experiemnts gets us fitter, may be cruel but for alot of medicines it is necessary to test them on something, usually rays but sometimes it must be other animals.

[guitargod6t9]

IF my body fails i would much rather just die because i def wouldnt be able to live without my dick....straight up.. thats the meaning of a man and i dont think i could live if i was just a head

[13redfan]

I read somewhere that we have already done a head transplant, by cooling the body down to very cold and slowing everything down (blood flowing to the brain, and oxygen and all that) and then putting it on another body. The only problem was they couldn't connect the nerves and stuff in the spinal column, so the person was basically just a head on a useless body. I have no idea if that's true or not, but I would only want to be a head without a body if my body was useless, and I would only be part android if say I lost an arm or a leg.

[joey11223]

im not exactly sure of the specifics of that monkey head transplant, but didnt it have some kind of control over its new body, correct me if im wrong though.

[malte332g]

Very interesting thought. Cannot help myself but to think of Sealab 2021 "I, Robot, Really" though

[slimslowslider]

LOL Slightly misread the Topic's title - I thought this was going to be a discussion of Harding's Zen book - 'On Having No Head'. Which brings up the rather interesting idea of a Zen monk with his head in a jar. Would he be there at all? I don't think I would like to be head in a jar - not until Virtual Reality gets better - or perhaps it would be OK if I could be put into some kind of never ending Lucid Dream? Its all quite cose to solipsism - I.e. how do you know you are NOT a head in a jar? Or a dude playing a virtual reality game in the future? Or a butterfly dreaming?

[joey11223]

NO NO please don;t bring up that train of thought, it scawwies mes ah great going now im starting to question reality again. I mean what if i jumped out the window now and killed myself. That would almost certainly end the virtual reailty scenario as i've just broken it by dieing in it, what would i wake up to? AHHHHHH! nonononononononononononnonono

[Artelis]

There is a Szymborska poem about this. Something about a dog head without a body, and it is perfectly content. I think it had an underlying idea of ignorance is bliss.

[The Cusp]

The undeveloped siamese twin reminds me of the movie Basket Case. I actually saw that monkey head transplant on television years back with my brother. Nobody every beleived me when I told them about it. After they attatched the new head to the new body, you could see the eyes of the monkey looking around, it was alilve and concious. Very creepy. Oh yeah, and it was the Pope's personal doctor who performed that head transplant.