BRAIN HARVEST

Another fan theory from early in LOST's initial TV run. It bridges the gap between death and rebirth in a grus

Fan Theory: Brain harvest.
The Oceanic 815 passengers actually died in the crash  but "their brains were salvaged and preserved on ice." And then a super-sophisticated future society salvaged their brains and implanted them into new genetically engineered clones, and put them on the island. The Others are part of this futuristic society, creating an "elaborate psychodrama" to help these unreconstructed 21st century personalities evolve spiritually, so they'll be fit to live in the "Brave New World" that exists outside the island.

Again, this theory tries to explain the initial gut reaction of viewers that the passengers of Flight 815 perished in the crash. It does a very LOST plot twist, to reveal yes they died, but not in the conventional sense.

The island as a stage set from a future society to "rehabilitate" century old brains is pure science-fiction. But as a concept, workable. It would also help explain what the smoke monster was: it was how mankind would fully evolve beyond a physical body and into a form of matter-energy beings.

It would be like archeologists from the 28th Century finding a group of computer hard drives in a secure government facility. In order to study and understand the 20th-21st centuries, they would want to "reconstruct" those memory banks.  With human subjects, advanced technology could be used to clone the actual humans and reconnect their brain's memories to see how each individual's personality would manifest itself in a series of experiments and tests. With such technology, the advanced scientists could test the limits of human free will, or suggest alternative outcomes in decision making processes. Or, as suggested in the theory, recondition the subjects "primitive thinking" to conform with their advanced society.

The concept that the characters were probed and forced to make difficult choices with little information or analysis was a theme inside the show's tangent plot lines. And the fact that each person was having strong memory flashbacks while on the island could give rise to the notion that the strongest memories would have survived the best in suspended animation. It also fits into the future story lines about the island being able to give "rebirth."

But one flaw in the theory is that someone with advanced scientific knowledge would have had to preserved the characters brains immediately after the crash. We have no evidence of an advanced alien medical staff on the island prior to the crash. And if there were advanced beings on the island to begin with, there would be no need to wait centuries in order to experiment with these human subjects.