One thing that’s always fas­cin­ated me about organic brains — in con­trast to elec­tronic equip­ment — is that they never crash in the same way. Or per­haps they’re crash­ing all the time and there’s enough redund­ancy to hide it away: it’s hard to tell.

Most elec­tron­ics are stable and reli­able for a good while, but once they start to fail they gen­er­ally don’t fail out­right. A wire or sol­der­ing point will start to come a little bit loose. Sud­denly your device doesn’t work when it’s too hot (or too cold) or it’ll stop work­ing until you give it a good bang or blow out some dust, or some­times you have to try turn­ing it on mul­tiple times before it turns on for good. Machines often don’t reach a sud­den death like organic brains do, where one second they’re “alive” and the next second they’re “dead” and there’s no hope of them com­ing back again (ignor­ing the fact that there’s always ample oppor­tun­ity to repair them).

I had a dream last night where one of my friends was like this. I can’t remem­ber how the dream star­ted, but he had some ill­ness, some virus or some­thing, and within a couple days he died.

But then he was alive again. For about a day, and then he died again. From what I can tell, he died whenever he shif­ted his focus from one thing to another. For instance, we were all in a van he was driv­ing — in ret­ro­spect it prob­ably wasn’t the wisest idea to give the driv­ing respons­ib­il­it­ies to a per­son who has a habit of dying — and the second he put the van into park and shut off the igni­tion, he was gone. It was like as soon as he fin­ished that task and had to think about what was com­ing next, his brain froze up and sud­denly for­got to keep his heart beat­ing and his lungs breathing.

The good news is once he cooled down a bit more he rebooted and came back to life.

I wanted to talk to him and his wife about the psy­cho­lo­gical implic­a­tions of this. Not just “what is it like to have come back from the dead?” but also “what is it like to know your brain isn’t reli­able? To know that it flick­ers back and forth between work­ing and non-​​working like an old NES cart­ridge?” but I never got the chance. His wife seemed to carry the idea that he was going to get repaired soon, that this was a tem­por­ary state.

This tone of look­ing at him like a machine isn’t just in ret­ro­spect; I thought like that dur­ing the dream, and hon­estly I think about people like that an awful lot. Life is unre­li­able in a lot of ways: our organs stop work­ing; we lose con­scious­ness; some­times we even go into veget­at­ive states. We never go into this “flick­er­ing” state, though, of some­times we work and some­times we don’t. It’s always fas­cin­ated me as to why.

One thing that's always fascinated me about organic brains---in contrast to electronic equipment---is that they never crash in the same way. Or perhaps they're crashing all the time and there's enough redundancy to hide it away: it's hard to tell. Most electronics are stable and reliable for a good while, but once they start to ...