Imagine it like this: a baby version of yourself with only enough of a brain structure to be alive in case you ever need a new kidney or liver.
Or, alternatively, he has speculated, you might one day get your brain placed into a younger clone. That could be a way to gain a second lifespan through a still hypothetical procedure known as a body transplant.
The fuller context of R3’s proposals, as well as activities of another stealth startup with related goals, have not previously been reported. They’ve been kept secret by a circle of extreme life-extension proponents who fear that their plans for immortality could be derailed by clickbait headlines and public backlash.
And that’s because the idea can sound like something straight from a creepy science fiction film. One person who heard R3’s clone presentation, and spoke on the condition of anonymity, was left reeling by its implications and shaken by Schloendorn’s enthusiastic delivery. The briefing, this person said, was like a “close encounter of the third kind” with “Dr. Strangelove.”
A key inspiration for Schloendorn is a birth defect in which children are born missing most of their cortical hemispheres; he’s shown people medical scans of these kids’ nearly empty skulls as evidence that a body can live without much of a brain.
And he’s talked about how to grow a clone. Since artificial wombs don’t exist yet, brainless bodies can’t be grown in a lab. So he’s said the first batch of brainless clones would have to be carried by women paid to do the job. In the future, though, one brainless clone could give birth to another.
Last Monday, the same day it announced itself to the world in Wired, R3 sent us a sweeping disavowal of our findings. It said Schloendorn “never made any statement regarding hypothetical ‘non-sentient human clones’ [that] would be carried by surrogates.” The most overarching of these challenges was its insistence that “any allegations of intent or conspiracy to create human clones or humans with brain damage are categorically false.”
My ‘no conspiracy to create humans with brain damage’ shirt is making people ask a lot of questions
Putting aside the sneering and philosophy to nerd for a minute, before getting back to it.
For a long time people were very into the split-consciousness notion of what happened to split-brain people, but a couple things have come around and now some people really think that the better way of thinking of it is still-unitary consciousness with a very difficult time moving around information between different sensory/expression modalities.
First, you get people who are born without a corpus callosum who are behaviorally normal (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13554794.2013.826690). They get a bit of extra connectivity sidways through their deep brain structure as some kind of homeostatic compensation, but the total amount is definitely low. What this says is there’s a difference between a brain that grew under a very unusual set of structural constraints, and one that grew normally that gets shredded. Similar with those people you find now and then with a brain that’s 90% fluid (though with the actual cortex pushed up against the skull around a big bubble of CSF) and the only neurological findings are things like weakness in one leg and an IQ of 80 (worth noting that this is still very very different from hydranencephaly) (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(07)61127-1/fulltext).
Second, when you do a wider range of experiments with the split brain people you find that while they cannot verbally say what is in their left visual field (which goes to the right side, while language is usually a left-side phenomenon) they can reliably state that something is there with speech, or either hand, and approximately where in the visual field it is. The low bandwidth awareness of presence is there, but they cannot get their speech capacity to access the details. It’s like their sight is now multiple separate sensory modalities, some of which is very difficult to talk about and some of which are very difficult to draw with particular hands.
https://www.uva.nl/shared-content/uva/en/news/press-releases/2017/01/split-brain-does-not-lead-to-split-consciousness.html
https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/140/5/1231/2951052
People argue a lot about what this means
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028393221002402
You can also apparently reorganize around very small amounts of remaining fibers to have no deficits like that, with no issues talking about anything in either part of the visual field
https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/022246/new-findings-split-brain-science-even-minimal-fiber-connections-can-unify-consciousness
Now, getting out of the nerd mode, there’s a LOT of weird literature from the 60s to 80s about people with very strange brain anatomy who nonetheless developed normally or better than expected
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1469-8749.1965.tb07839.x
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.7434023
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-8749.1999.tb00621.x
“Consciousness in congenitally decorticate children: developmental vegetative state as self-fulfilling prophecy”
Worth noting that I looked at that paper and these case studies do have noticeable brian mass around the base of the skull, just not much.
Edit I am also very mad at how people so reductionistically talk about different behaviors being restricted to different parts of brain anatomy. It’s different in different creatures. You strip the cortex out of an adult cat and itll still walk around and look at things, though not be all there (yes this was done in the sixties), you strip it from an adult human you get a vegetable. Lots of brain parts are capable of lots of things, its just that as brains get bigger the more peripheral parts are easier to expand faster and grow in importance, their fibers exerting more control over the rest, and I would not be surprised at all at other brain bits being capable of quite a lot when they grow without the influence of the bigger bits.
Anybody ever read the short story “Cutie” by Greg Egan? Very apropos…>