Poll: Brain Transplant > Cloning

[A.A.K]

Hypothetical Brain Transplant, would this be more 'unethical, immoral, cruel' then cloning? personally i seen nothing wrong with cloning, but would a brain transplant be more supposedly evil?

you would literally become another person and you are officially- a people jacker. you will have the memories and thought processes, addictions, motions, speech patterns etc. the lot! from the prior person. the only change would be your body.

whilst cloning is just making a copy of someone for our bidding

But whats your view?

 

[Brett Alex]

Hypothetical Brain Transplant, would this be more 'unethical, immoral, cruel' then cloning? personally i seen nothing wrong with cloning, but would a brain transplant be more supposedly evil?

you would literally become another person and you are officially- a people jacker. you will have the memories and thought processes, addictions, motions, speech patterns etc. the lot! from the prior person. the only change would be your body.

whilst cloning is just making a copy of someone for our bidding

But whats your view?

Are you talking a physical brain transplant, or some kind of consciousness transferal? And you have both theirs and your memory, but yours are the, for want of a better word, dominant?

EDIT:
Oh, hang on, are you suggesting its reversed, as in, you absorb someone else's consciousness and memories?

 

[Amnestic]

Wow, that's some hypothetical situation. When I hear "Brain transplant" I assume you meant putting your brain into someone else's body.

Kinda like Doctor Who's regeneration thingy, except with less time travelling police boxes.

What you're suggesting is...uh...I'm not really sure, but I'm reminded of the brain bugs from Starship Troopers.

also:

whilst cloning is just making a copy of someone for our bidding

Since when? Was there some sort of international science convention when we decided Clones will all have less rights than natural-born humans that I missed? I never get the memos anymore.

 

[Eagle Est1986]

I don't really think either of them are evil...... is there an option for that or does 'indifferent' cover that?

 

[Brett Alex]

What you're suggesting is...uh...I'm not really sure, but I'm reminded of the brain bugs from Starship Troopers.

Or Prototype style I think. Same kinda thing, just one of you isn't a giant slug in that example.

 

[Elven Marksman]

Oh, hang on, are you suggesting its reversed, as in, you absorb someone else's consciousness and memories?

That just sounds evil...I suck the memories and consciousness from your very skull! sounds like a line they would use for a villan =D

 

[Amnestic]

What you're suggesting is...uh...I'm not really sure, but I'm reminded of the brain bugs from Starship Troopers.

Or Prototype style I think. Same kinda thing, just one of you isn't a giant slug in that example.

That's a much better example than my one, and I should probably have thought of it since I do own Prototype.

 

[Gebi10000]

technology is never inherently evil. it's what you do with it.

 

[Socius]

make a mindless clone, THEN do the braintransplant! I see nothing evil by that...

 

[Brett Alex]

What you're suggesting is...uh...I'm not really sure, but I'm reminded of the brain bugs from Starship Troopers.

Or Prototype style I think. Same kinda thing, just one of you isn't a giant slug in that example.

That's a much better example than my one, and I should probably have thought of it since I do own Prototype.

Still, if that is right, I don't see how it relates to cloning though.

 

[iJosh]

Indifferent, but the braintransplant into a machine or something would be so much more evil and bad ass.

 

[Kollega]

make a mindless clone, THEN do the braintransplant! I see nothing evil by that...

Pretty much that. If someone really wants,they can clone their own body without brain and stick their brain into it. Or just put it in a jar and screw it onto mechanical body. Hijacking someone else,on the other hand,is certainly not most ethical thing to do.

As for cloning,it's not too immoral. It's just making a completely new human - if someone was to clone Hitler,the clone would not have Hitler's personality.

Also yay,Godwin's Law!

 

[TheSeventhLoneWolf]

philosphy and ethics classes are all coming back to me.

Cloning would go against some religious beliefs that we would be 'playing god' and creating life for ourselves and in other beliefs it may break the cycles of samsara, ect.

Transplanting would probably be less evil, but if we decided something was a good idea in science, someone in religion would disagree with it.

Science, we have the facts, but where is the theory.
Religion, we have the theory but where are the facts.

Why can't we all just get along? - Rhetorical.

 

[rokkolpo]

considering that cloning isn,t evil in any way, neither is brain transplant.

it's just weirder.(more fucked up)

EDIT:hmm interesting 666 posts while talking about evil.

 

[VanityGirl]

I think someone once said if you transplanted a brain, then you'd have the other person's memories, but somehow you would get some of your older memories back. (Of course, that's a theory because it hasn't been done.)

Cloning...meh. I don't know why you'd clone a WHOLE person. Nothing wrong with cloning a new liver, or a new heart or something.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

If you were to place your entire brain into a different body, wouldn't that body's immunological systems attack your brain as a foreign object for the rest of your life? You'd be stuck on the same immunosuppressant drugs that other organ recipients would... only you couldn't just stick another brain in if they didn't work.

 

[Amnestic]

If you were to place your entire brain into a different body, wouldn't that body's immunological systems attack your brain as a foreign object for the rest of your life? You'd be stuck on the same immunosuppressant drugs that other organ recipients would... only you couldn't just stick another brain in if they didn't work.

Not if you stuck your brain inside a clone of yourself - you'd have the same immune systems...I think?

 

[Agema]

I think someone once said if you transplanted a brain, then you'd have the other person's memories, but somehow you would get some of your older memories back. (Of course, that's a theory because it hasn't been done.)

Certainly not.

Every thought you have is encoded by the structure and activity of your brain cells. If it were possible to transplant a brain, the process would remove the the body donor's brain, and therefore their memories, thought processes, and pretty much everything else that would make them anything more than a sack of flesh.

* * *

One thing I would say, is that human cloning should be possible fairly soon. I think there's almost no possibility of brain transplants or consciousness transfers to another brain in our lifetimes. Consciousness transfers from a brain to a computer, maybe.

 

[Agema]

If you were to place your entire brain into a different body, wouldn't that body's immunological systems attack your brain as a foreign object for the rest of your life? You'd be stuck on the same immunosuppressant drugs that other organ recipients would... only you couldn't just stick another brain in if they didn't work.

Apologies for the double post...

There would likely be some problems in this regard, yes.

The central nervous system is actually isolated from the main immune system in the blood, and has it's own one based on microglia rather than T-cells and so on - the peripheral immune system already interprets most of the brain as foreign matter, never mind someone else's brain. Consequently, on occasions where the barrier between the blood and brain is broken, the brain's immune system releases chemicals that suppress certain aspects of the peripheral immune system anyway.

 

[Veylon]

They both suffer from the same ethical problem: is it okay to destroy another's life?

When you create a clone, you're not creating a "copy", you're creating another whole human being, a being that deserves the same rights and privileges as any other human. Unless, of course, you create a brainless clone. This clone would not be a human being by virtue of not having a mind.

When you "transplant" a brain, you're taking the body of another. If their brain was destroyed, all right, they were already dead. But it wasn't, you're killing them.

So cloning is the lesser evil simply because it doesn't necessarily involve killing. Not that it's all that ethically justifiable....