BrainEx
The brain at the moment of death has a neurological meltdown. Within ten minutes of cardiac arrest a final synaptic wave of cell depolarization takes place; a tsunami of chaotic activity that sweeps through the brain entire, short circuiting neural paths. While cell depolarization can be reversible, the chaos and destruction following is annihilating; brain structure begins to melt into an undifferentiated liquid. The timeline for such annihilation, however, remains uncertain; the irreversible disintegration of death is a long process and we do not yet know all the parts of the sequence.
In 2019 scientists were astonished to discover that they could turn on recently deceased disembodied pig brains some hours after death. With the use of a strange fluid-pumping machine called BrainEx (an extracorporeal pulsatile-perfusion system) the scientists restored cellular life in the brains, reversing the disintegration. Though the brains were technically “alive” the experiment did not, allegedly, restore any consciousness in the pig—for that would be cruel; but in the future it may be possible to make the pig think. Bioethicists became concerned: according to them the ability to keep ex-vivo brains alive indefinitely promises a living hell.
Science is determined to imagine in real life those thought experiments cooked up by a deranged philosophy. In this case the famous brain in a vat image that attempts to illustrate cartesian skepticism: an evil genius is keeping a brain in a vat alive while sending it chemical signals that make it feel as if it is walking abroad on the green earth. Clearly (according to philosophy) were this brain able to think, it may begin to distrust its senses and with enough rational skepticism it will soon produce ground zero rationalism: I think therefore I am. In this quasi-medieval world, thinking is the stuff of gods and feeling is the stuff of base animal bodies (who are no better than soulless machines). This is Plato’s cave remixed for the lab, and prototypical of the Matrix and Philip K Dick style reality paranoia. It is the fetish of the mystical brain as the source of all intellect, spirit and humanity kept alive today by neuroscience; the brain is exalted as the seat of experience itself; it amounts to a modern transmutation of the old Christian idea of the immortal soul.
In short, attempting to imagine what a disembodied pig brain hooked up to an oxygen pump feels like (or what a soul feels like for that matter), is literally meaningless. Or to put it another way; perhaps the pig brain feels like the BrainEx machine.
