Also I didn’t feel it necessarily to mention, but there are established protocols for communication with locked in patients. Effectively you explain to them you know they are locked in and work to develop any effective feedback loop, be it brain wave biofeedback, blinking, or anything else.

Once you can reliably ask yes no questions (and trust you aren’t miss interpreting the patient) you can eventually get to important questions like “do you want to live like this?”

Are you talking to the conscious or subconscious?

Am I weird that I think suffering past a certain level is worse than death?

It sounds excruciatingly difficult, but I don't know. It seems worth doing to me.

I guess it matters what you think life is for. I don't think I get another go at life on this planet, so I figure I might as well experience as much of it as I can, even if it's extremely limited and painful.

No you are not. The OP is being emotional and somehow thinks he is special and deserves some more treatment. I think everyone deserves some healthcare (proportional to the advancement of society). But at a certain cost (and time), just pull the stupid plug and move on.

That's how most of your ancestors for most of their lives did.

I don't have any problem with my organs being used after my death, but that decision should be made by my family and not the vultures at the hospital.

Thus, organ harvesters prefer patients who are physically alive but brain dead. Organ donor status basically gives them permission to harvest your still-beating heart.

The 'ticking clock' scenario you outlined makes no sense and now you're just spreading scare mongering.

On the contrary, it seems like they'll keep you on life support after brain death to ensure your organs are still fresh.

> that decision should be made by my family and not the vultures at the hospital.

I mean, sure. In most places it's your next of kin that decide. You do know that the hospital doesn't get paid for organs donated, right? I have no idea what incentives you think they have to kill you.

Believe it or not, money is not the only motivator of people. Wanting to help someone you have a stronger relationship with (because one patient can communicate, the other cannot) could be incentive enough for some people. And doctors are, in the end, just people.

I am not suggesting that most doctors would do this, or even a sizable percentage, but it would be reassuring that measures would be in place to ensure what the GP is talking about cannot happen. I suspect everyone realises this, and there are actually systems in place to protect organ donors against harvesting whilst still alive.

Edit: this comment suggests the GP's fears are not so far fetched https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33300503 EEP!

Otherwise you’d be doing two surgeries back to back, using two different skill sets and at two different locations.

At least if it's aboveboard and in the US. Getting Steve Jobs an off the books pancreas would obviously have been exceedingly profitable. And I cannot speak to what happens in other countries.

But in general, the biggest cost is from the hospital stay for the recipient, followed by the surgery transplanting the organ itself. And, usually, the next cost will be transporting the organ, not acquiring it.

How is being trapped inside your head, potentially forever less of a nightmare scenario?

I'll go the opposite "If you detect I'm conscious, kill me asap!"

But if they can detect I'm thinking, they can detect at least binary differences between my mental state. Which means that I can communicate somehow.

It's hard to do both of those things; you will die of dehydration before hunger is more than an inconvenience.

I mean I would "gladly" spend 2 years starring at the ceiling to see my son again etc. But there is probably a upper limit on the amount of years ... maybe they can induce coma somehow to make time pass and wake you up every month to see if things improve.

By your logic lets pull the plug off everyone who has a minor incident leaving in coma for a few days

This is a fair point, and for me I would accept the solution of massive doses of diamorphine.

George Washington famously feared premature burial. While on his deathbed in 1799, he instructed his personal secretary Tobias Lear to make sure he was dead before he was buried:

“Have me decently buried; and do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.”

Washington ushered in an era of taphophobia, or fear of premature burial. During the 19th century, popular books and magazines promoted the idea that many people were buried alive. They reported tales of bloody shrouds, gnawed fingers and horribly contorted bodies inside their coffins.

“Less than 150 years ago many medical practitioners freely admitted to being uncertain whether their patients were dead or alive,” wrote Jan Bondeson in Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear, published in 2002.

https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/when-fears-of-pr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_coffin

https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/3515/ancient-traditi...

“If he wasn’t dead before, he is now!”

Jesus is (and was) the greatest Jew that walked this earth. His life, death and resurrection is foundational to the world having unrestricted access to the God of the Israelites.

I’m firmly in the camp of being vastly more terrified of being stuck or trapped somewhere for an indefinite amount of time.

[1]https://www.popsci.com/article/science/how-long-could-you-su...

Edit; found [0] ; 28 hours it was.

Cave exploring is my worst nightmare (I am claustrophobic) but actually seeing videos of people enjoying that and saying ‘now I cannot move my arms and I only can wriggle part of a inch forward or backward at a time’ [1] while smiling is just the stuff of nightmares to me (this guy does many narrow cave videos that trigger angst in me).

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutty_Putty_Cave

[1] https://youtu.be/FAg8EkDiIXk

The one thing that is nearly always done is bringing the victim home, but here they did something so bazaar that I still can't quite get my head around it, his widow and child left with the thought that his final resting place was upside down and contorted. By the time he gave up and made his final wish, I do not think he was in his right mind, with support for this by his family in horror and grief, likely also not thinking clearly. Maybe it is for the best that they closed and sealed the cave, but leaving him in there was questionable and grotesque. I realize the circumstances were incredibly difficult, but when the rescue failed, all involved quickly took the path of least resistance rather than in consideration of how time changes things for the survivors. I don't know how one would come to terms with that; the tragedy seems left unresolved.

Why people do that, I have no idea...on the other hand, I feel like maybe I'm judging people for doing something they feel compelled to do and that kind of makes my anxiety about it worse.

I mean, I don't understand it, but I guess that doesn't make it wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd_Collins

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip9VGZeqMfo if you fancy a documentary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Blunden

A eeg is afaik done as a matter of course in these situations. Fmri is not realistic or necessarily

Some of these people who are in a coma can, as has been shown, still hear sound and react or even answer by activating certain brain regions which can be measured.

But what if you can't hear anymore? It doesn't seem to imply you're dead. For instance, I could imagine, purely hypothetically, that someone could use your sense of touch to input a bit-pattern or even Morsecode to initiate communication, to which one might be able to react by thinking (communicate back).

Of course, that seems highly impractical and unlikely to happen, but it is an interesting meditation to contemplate what one would consider for themselves to "be alive".

It's a weird place where we don't consider it killing to let a helpless body starve, but we do consider it killing to inject something that ends things quickly. Both sound like killing to me, and both are ok in some situations.

There are endless things that distance this from the trolley problem, but mainly starving someone to death isn’t inaction, it’s a conscious clinical choice.

It’s utterly bizarre in my mind that is what the USA settled on as a grotesque compromise. Particularly so because outside the medical setting this would still be homicide by starvation.

You and I have very, very, different definitions of “nightmare fuel.”

What if - being in a conscious coma is worse than dying? What if it isn’t a dream-like wonder of your own world? What if you lay there and you can’t dream? You can’t sleep, you can’t move, you feel everything, you can’t focus or meditate, you just lie there is permanent torture that you can’t stop.

I don’t know why people imagine the cleanest possible scenario for their fantasy play throughs.

At least imagine the dirty murky ones if you refuse to imagine the worst case.

Something I teach with self-defense is ”Ok, you have made peace with yourself that if a 6’4 meth addled line backer breaks in to your house in a rage, you are morally checked out to end them - now what about a pregnant 14yo girl and you can’t see her hands? Maybe, consider your absolute first move to be asking them to leave?” … don’t be absolute with anything that you plan for.

I’ve had experiences where I was aware of people and what was going on, but from the outside, it looks like I am passed out. It wasn’t really that bad.

I know of others who experience what is typically called “sleep paralysis”. It often comes with hallucinations and night terrors.

Source:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/22/1047664/locked-i...

https://www.stchristophers.org.uk/about/damecicelysaunders

"Cicely's strong Christian faith was a fundamental factor in her commitment to the dying"

Physician assisted suicide is another seperate issue - and "pulling the plug" on a comatose patient is NOT euthanasia. That is hospice and palliative care.

You're beating the straw man my friend...