While I don't think I've mentioned it before on these forums, I have considered the idea of using an organic brain instead of a cyberbrain a while back (before Rimward I think). Yes, the brain box will work just fine. I would have allowed some sort of work around before Transhuman was released.

LatwPIAT wrote:

You would not [i]believe[/i] how annoyed I am that the device that works like a [i]Ghost in the Shell[/i] cyberbrain is not called a "cyberbrain", while the device that's actually named "cyberbrain" does not work at all like a GitS-style cyberbrain. :P

Yeah, but you have to admit: the GitS implant called the cyberbrain is only partially "cyber", while the EP version of the cyberbrain is literally that. But yeah, it took me a while to grasp as well. One of my players was even worried he wouldn't be able to fork easily in this game because of his understanding of "ghost dubbing".

Actually from what I understood a GitS cyberbrain is mostly computer but with some biological tissue in them to supply the "ghost".

Which is why in my GitS hack (that I never finished, and with my computer exploding last week likely never will) almost everyone was a pod. Before the Brain Box implant it was basically the closest you could get to how the GitS stuff worked.

Close to literal explosion. The self contained liquid cooling loop for the CPU sprung a very sudden over pressure leak. The fluid flooded the PSU, which went bang. Not 'oh no I have shorted bang', but 'oh fuck dive for cover bang'. Not something I had seen before, or thought was particularly possible. PSU gone, GPU gone, RAM gone, Mobo gone, HDD refusing to be recognised on any of my spare rigs. Don't know what has happened to it, but whatever it is isn't worth the time or effort for me to get something pulled out. The CPU survived though! Shame it's an old i7 950 that should have been replaced with an ivy-bridge last year. I hear that there is still a market for them amongst people with outdated mobos though. Onto eBay it goes.

Why would you bother making a pod with a full biological brain, when you could just spend another fifteen days and grow a full-fledged biomorph? Remember, it only takes three days per wound to regrow a body from a severed (but still living) head, while it takes a year and a half to grow a new biomorph. The difference between those times? That's because of how much difficulty Eclipse Phase has in growing new biomorph brains. If I was a doctor in Eclipse Phase, and someone came to me to ask me to perform the operation you described, I'd refuse on ethical grounds, and tell them to just resleeve, so their pod body could be used by one of the millions of people still waiting in Cold Storage for a body.

@nick: An egobridge can install a new ego in a brain quickly, and that obviously requires you to take a lot of the stuff in the brain completely apart and reassemble it anew. This task is at most a single order of magnitude less difficult than taking vatgrown nerve tissue and building a brain from scratch. So it doesn't make sense that the brain growing part is difficult. The simple fact is that egobridges, healing vats and morph growth times present an inconsistent picture - at least I can't come up with any remotely good explanation for how it can be so. I can easily live with it, but it doesn't make sense (except for the desire to have expensive morphs alongside fast resleeving and healing). If I wanted to fix it I'd either drop pure biobrains (so you only had cybebrains and hybrid brains where the ego reside entirely in the cyberparts and the bio parts are unchanged when sleeving) and reduce healing vat capability dramatically, or I'd simply let morphs be grown quickly. They'd still be expensive in the inner system, and the outer system could have the shortage based more on the resources needed for living than the cost of the morph itself. As it is, there is also little rationale behind the price differences between morphs. Why should it be so much more expensive to grow one type of morph compared to another? You could justify that with compatibility issues - to take advantage of a Sylph's SAV bonus you can't just sleeve into any Sylph, you need one that fits your neural design. The higher the bonus, the better it has to fit, and that means either having it custom grown or buying one that fits you - and that means getting it from someone that stocks enough morphs to have a compatible one, and that is costly.

LatwPIAT wrote:

If we're going to use that straight readings of the rules, I'd like to point out that it takes "a matter of hours or days" to make a synthmorph with a Brain Box, so it actually only takes at most a few days to grow a human brain...

Unless the brain box is unique in requiring a pre-grown brain to commit to the implant.

LatwPIAT wrote:

There's no actual mechanical representation of being decapitated; you say five wounds, but it could also be a hundred wounds. (Mechanically, there's also no difference between missing the top half and missing the bottom half of your torso; regrowing both takes 3 days per wound, so mechanically speaking it by that process takes just 22.5 days to regrow a brain.) It is, of course, up to individual interpretation, but personally I'd chose to interpret this as "it takes six months to grow new limbs", and "it takes several years to grow a spine" rather than "it takes two weeks to grow a body".

But you are forgetting that the healing vat explicitly requires a living subject in order to revive them; there is no known way to survive without an intact head, and the only way that you can even survive as [b]just[/b] an intact head is to have medichines (and even then, you've got a time limit). So far as I can tell, there's no possible way that you could be revived in a healing vat without a brain, and that implies that the brain is the one part of the body that is not easily repaired or grown.

LatwPIAT wrote:

There's no known way to survive without an intact torso either, but that doesn't seem to stop the healing vat... In any case, Healing Vats are described as restoring recently dead people to life (p. 208), so they don't seem to actually require a living subject. (And it's debatable whether a severed head preserved in nanostasis by medichines can be considered "living".) In any case, I'm seriously trying to argue that you can take someone's severed finger and restore them to life from it; I'm more trying to argue that if you take the mechanics of the healing vat to mean that an entire body can be grown from nothing but a head in fifteen days, then you're making assumptions about how the setting works that aren't actually warranted by the text.

Well, according to the core book, page 326-7: [i]As long as the patient is alive when they are place in the healing vat, they will not only survive, but emerge without a scratch. A healing vat can even take a severed head (as long as it has been stabilized by medichines or nanotech first aid) and regrow an entire body based on the head’s genetics.[/i] This very much implies, if not states it explicitly, that a severed head stabilized with nanotech [i]is alive[/i], much as surgeons today can keep a person alive after removing significantly important organs. But nothing as of yet states that the head is unnecessary for remaining alive. Furthermore, the chart on the second page [i]explicitly[/i] states that reviving a mostly dead character in stasis takes 3 days per wound (it also uses very odd wording which states "Restoring recently dead character who was placed in medical stasis to avoid death", doing little to quell this argument).

LatwPIAT wrote:

It's possible that it's the human brain that's the limiting factor in growing a human body, in which case growing the rest takes [arbitrary amount of time], but I could equally submit that it's the spinal cord that's the limiting factor, and that you therefore can't grow an adult torso in less than 18 months, leaving entire bodies outside the realm of what a healing vat can toss up in a few weeks.

Except for the fact that the healing vat information says it can regrow your whole body. Spine and all.

Smokeskin wrote:

However ryou interpret it LatwPIAT, you still have the egobridge that can complete rearrange and reshape the cells in a brain within an hour. Give it a supply of vatgrown neural tissue and each egobridge could crank out many brains per day.

It depends on how much construction said nanomachines actually do. From my understanding of things, the ego bridge merely arranges and creates synapses and neurons. It does nothing with the greater mass of brain matter that exists. And it probably does nothing at all with the autonomic regions of the brain.

UnitOmega wrote:

Personally, I always assumed the usual "we can revive you from just a head, but if the head's destroyed, you're dead" thing was that if you're missing key parts of your brain, the ego using that brain is damaged possibly missing major memories, skills, etc. If your whole brain is gone, then it's hard for the healing vat to perfectly replicate the brain tissue as you. It might just come out factory-clone fresh. This isn't a huge deal, because you could use an ego bridge to boot from the stack if it survived, but I also assume that's a separate piece of equipment, requiring more time and different procedures. I'd assume growing an "unformatted brain" probably only takes a few days via healing vat.

However, that's inconsistent with the stated fact that it takes a year and a half to produce a biomorph, and half a year to produce a pod. Presumably, there is a feature of the brain that makes it difficult to produce, but simple to modify once completed.

nick012000 wrote:

However, that's inconsistent with the stated fact that it takes a year and a half to produce a biomorph, and half a year to produce a pod. Presumably, there is a feature of the brain that makes it difficult to produce, but simple to modify once completed.

I don't think so. The growth time on a full biomorph is accelerated development, right? It goes from the embryo phase to an adult body in that time, so you get full development of everything. Flash cloning/printing new organs in their fully-grown form based on the DNA of the subject has to be much quicker. And is much quicker for all the other major organs. A morph taking enough damage to be missing the head would probably count as "Restoring recently dead character who is placed in medical stasis to avoid death, and who is missing most of their body.", so it'd probably like 15 days before they grew the full head back. And you'd probably still need to reupload the ego, since again, I assume a "factory fresh" brain probably wouldn't have most of the memory information and stuff if you just regrew all the cells. A few days is a little short, but a couple of weeks per brain doesn't seem so far-fetched.

Decivre wrote:

Note, I'm not trying to justify the whole concept into something that makes sense within real life. I'm trying to justify it within the context of the fiction. If biomorphs take 3 years to manufacture, but all parts excepting the brain take a few days in a healing vat, the logical leap is that something about the brain takes a long time to manufacture.

Yeah, it would be nice if there was some sort of reasonable explanation. The brain-is-hard-to-grow doesn't truly fix the problem though - you could still grow biomorphs with cyberbrains quickly then, which wouldn't get you the "biomorphs are a scarce resource" that the EP setting needs.

Decivre wrote:

Smokeskin wrote:

And how do you "merely arrange and create synapses and neurons? These are brain cells, packed together tight, and they have internal properties that determine how they function, when and how they send signals (and that's a large part of what makes one person different from another). You need to separate cells, change their internal cell structure and create new cells to spec, shuffle them around and then reconnect them. If you can do that in the parts that house personality, skills and memory, you can do it in all parts. And if you can do that, you can create a brain from just a raw supply of neural cells.

The obvious implication is that raw neural cells, or perhaps neural cells configured into a brain, blanked or otherwise, is a hard thing to nanoconstruct. All the nanites can do is alter cells already present.

Yeah, but that's not really how it works. Altering already present cells is going to be harder, if anything. A neuron that has learned to respond in a certain way is hard to "untrain". Taking cell connections apart and reassembling them is harder than just assembling them. It is a bit like having to build a new house - would you prefer to get your raw materials from another house, or just get a shipment of bricks, mortars and wood? I think I came up with a better solution that fits the current mechanics - the brain you sleeve into isn't just a brain. It's a brain interlaced with a fine web of nanomachinery that doesn't just read the neural state for the cortical stack, this web can also stimulate neurons and transmit signals. These nanomachinery are not mesh-accessible or programmable as such - they're little more than a bunch of artificial neurons and synapses, more like simple electronics strung together with cables than actual computers. And this is where the egobridge does most of its work. Sure it cuts and alters some synapses and neurons, but mostly it rewires the web of nanomachinery so they combined with the brain will run your ego.