MIT Scientists Trying To Invent Zombies

No power at the Briggs ranch, so I won’t see any comments.

There are two meanings to zombie. The first are walking corpse, one of the rapacious undead who prowl the earth after Hell fills up, creatures that seek living flesh, and which can only be killed, as the motion-picture industry assures us, by disabling their brains—the last remnant of the monster that remains human.

The second is a philosopher’s invention. This zombie is a creature that has the outward, even inward, appearance of a man, made of meat like us, but a being which is not a being at all, but a bio-machine, perhaps endowed with AI-mimicry. A machine that does not have the soul of a man.

Scientists are boasting of the soon-to-be-here capability of growing the second kind of zombie. Only they don’t call it a zombie, but a bodyoid. Which sounds like a bad B-movie monster.

Now if you can grow a liver in a jar it might be used to transplant into someone who’s liver has gone sour. Few grow squeamish over this idea. But why stop with a mere liver when you can grow a whole human-like creature, who will come to the knife when you call, a bio-machine complete with spleen, lungs, heart, but not, say MIT scientists, “the parts of brains associated with consciousness”.

“Associated with” is one of several hand-waving phrases scientists use to bluff listeners into thinking they, the scientists, know what is going on. They do not. If they did, they wouldn’t say “associated with”. They’d say, “Here is the brain and here is how it creates consciousness.” Which they can’t say, because they don’t know. That means any claims that if you leave this or that part of the brain out, and the result will be a non-conscious zombie, are guesses.

What about this:

Although it may seem like science fiction, recent technological progress has pushed this concept [stem cell research] into the realm of plausibility. Pluripotent stem cells, one of the earliest cell types to form during development, can give rise to every type of cell in the adult body. Recently, researchers have used these stem cells to create structures that seem to mimic the early development of actual human embryos. At the same time, artificial uterus technology is rapidly advancing, and other pathways may be opening to allow for the development of fetuses outside of the body. 

Such technologies, together with established genetic techniques to inhibit brain development, make it possible to envision the creation of “bodyoids”—a potentially unlimited source of human bodies, developed entirely outside of a human body from stem cells, that lack sentience or the ability to feel pain.

One should be reminded here of Bokanovsky’s process. This was the fictional method in Brave New World to take a fertilized egg and split it off before it itself got a long way into its own splitting, and so make clones. It was only used on the Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon worker or drone classes of humans. A cheap way to produce crude bodies useful to the higher Alpha and Beta classes.

Here Huxley guessed wrong. Given what some are calling the “fertility crisis” is not happening in the toiling races, but in those who can think up names like bodyoid.

Real bodies may suffer trauma, but it’s true that pain, like joy, is in the mind. A machine cannot feel pain or joy. But animals can, and so do we. The mind of humans is of a different class than in animals, but both are conscious. The liver in the jar does not have a mind. But it has to be kept viable by artificial means, and either way it goes past its expiration date fast.

Not so a zombie, or bodyoid, which would seem to be a complete creature without any kind of consciousness. Or so they say. How it would remain alive, or viable, without any central nervous system is unknown. And maybe even impossible.

Here the article falls back on boastful promises: “There are still many technical roadblocks to achieving this vision…” This is science-speak for “We have no idea.”

Of course, exciting possibilities are not certainties. We do not know whether the embryo models recently created from stem cells could give rise to living people or, thus far, even to living mice. We do not know when, or whether, an effective technique will be found for successfully gestating human bodies entirely outside a person. We cannot be sure whether such bodyoids can survive without ever having developed brains or the parts of brains associated with consciousness, or whether they would still serve as accurate models for living people without those brain functions.

Exciting!

Which means they’re admitting the bodoids will almost surely have to have nerves, and a collection place in their bodies to control signaling of these nerves, a central nervous system, which is a brain, which means these things will be alive.

They even admit to cloning, or something like it:

Bodyoids developed from a patient’s cells could also allow for personalized screening of drugs, allowing physicians to directly assess the effect of different interventions in a biological model that accurately reflects a patient’s own personal genetics and physiology. 

Here they might have a better sales pitch. “It’s not really a person. It’s you. A copy. We’ll keep it alive and promise it will feel no pain as we hack away at it for a replacement colon for you. And since it’s you it’s already yours.”

I won’t bother quoting any of the marketing pitch, but what drives all this is pure utilitarianism. Make your brief life slightly better at the expense of, well, we’ll not think about at whose expense. Just think how deserving you are. Hard to find an ad these days that doesn’t use “deserve.”

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