THE UNDEAD

The first attempts to bring people back from the dead are slated to start this year.

This controversial plan was thwarted last year in India.

Bioquark, a Philadelphia-based company, announced in late 2016 that they believe brain death is not 'irreversible'. According to the Daily Mail, CEO Ira Pastor has revealed they will soon be testing an unprecedented stem cell method on patients in an unidentified country in Latin America, confirming the details in the next few months. 

To be declared officially dead in the majority of countries, you have to experience complete and irreversible loss of brain function, or 'brain death'.  According to Pastor, Bioquark has developed a series of injections that can reboot the brain - and they plan to try it out on humans this year.

They have no plans to test on animals first. 

Medical science has tight protocols before experimentation can begin on humans. There must be peer review on research, animal trials, then clinical trials. At each stage of the process, the results are published and reviewed by authorities before permission can be granted to proceed. Here, the company is going straight to the end game without any factual foundation. 

HOW BIOQUARK PLAN TO TRY REVERSING BRAIN DEATH:

1) Harvest stem cells from the patient's own blood, and inject this back into their body.

2) Inject peptides into the patient's spinal cord.

3) Fifteen days of laser and median nerve stimulation - while monitoring the patients using MRI scans.

The patient needs to keep oxygen pumping through the body to  keep the brain stem functioning - for example, by keeping a person on a ventilator. It means that most countries today, including the US and the UK, identify death as permanent loss of brain stem function. The researchers are looking to stop families or doctors from pulling the plug on their brain dead patients.

There is no precedent for what researchers plan to do. It may be a very expensive (the article did not say) method with no chance of success (but some families will pay anything in the hope of getting their loved ones back).  So critics and cynics have raised concerns that the company is not going through normal protocols to test their theories before using human beings as test dummies. That is the reason why the medical boards in India stopped the company from doing work in that country.

The ramifications of re-booting a brain dead patient can be severe. What if it only partially works and the patient only has minimum brain activity (such as in a deep coma state with no communication skills). Is that really a quality life? What if it does not activate brain memories, speech, eyesight or senses but merely pain? Then what happens to the patient? What are the unintended consequences of playing god?

It seems LOST also played fast and loose with medical ethics on the island. It used mind control and chemical weapons experimentation which hit its evil zenith after Ben's coup.  The concept of immortality by regular brain reanimations is in the realm of science fiction. But there appears to be some researchers who dare to try it in real life.

HUGO

Author Victor Hugo wrote, "There is nothing like a dream to create the future."

In Dream Theory, your subconscious mind recreates worlds in which to run simulations, fantasies and comparisons with data collected by your conscious mind. This duality or mirror image of information is used by humans to frame future references, categorize experiences and hard wire memories.

The signals get crossed when the  subconscious mind escapes from the darkness of the dream state and into the light of reality.

Escape, such as the release of the huge "purple wave" when the Numbers were not put into the computer in time. The Numbers, a sequence of digits to be imputed by rote into the operator's mind. It is symbolic of counting numbers backward in order to fall under anesthesia or like counting sheep in order to achieve slumber.

Once the subconscious mind bleeds over into the real cognitive operations of the mind, one may become unstable, delusional, paranoid, extremely introverted, isolated or angry at the harsh inconsistencies between what should be (as found in the dream state) and what is (reality).

There were many fan theories about LOST which centered on the fact that Hurley was the key character who was always around the action, but never got hurt. Why? Because in the dream state, the person's build in primal safety mechanisms of instinct and reaction will not allow you to get hurt. And if you live in the dream state long enough, you can begin to control it - - - and its perceived outcome. Once you believe you can control your own destiny, you can stand by the sidelines and watch the action knowing that since you created it, you cannot get hurt.

Not getting hurt is another basic human defense system. No one outwardly goes forward in life wanting to hurt themselves, either physically or emotionally. People try to connect at deep, interpersonal levels, to help to cope with the pressures, struggles and pain of normal life activities and relationships. Families are the first and foremost bonds of safety and companionship. But if that bond is weakened or broken early in life, a child may rush to the safety of his own dream state in order to cope with a terrible loss.

Hurley did so when his father left him. His abandonment issues were never resolved in the pre-island world of reality. One could speculate that the island, with a broad base of strange people, was created by Hurley's dream state in order to find permanent replacement friends to fill the void of his lost father since as a child he decided he did not have a future without a father figure to guide him.

Hurley was the one character that got along with everyone on the island, which is a statistical improbability unless Hurley predetermined he would get along with everyone on the island. It is the self-fulfilling prophecy which in itself is a self-directed con, or cheat. He created great, lively, charismatic imaginary friends in order to create a fun, adventurous future for himself (a loser with no ambition or prospects in real life).

In this context, LOST is really a sad, sad story of a young man escaping his own reality in order to hide in his subconscious dream state.

SIMULATION

One premise of LOST was that it was only a simulation of reality.

It could have been a video adventure game with the characters being avatars.
It could have been an interconnected dream experiment.
It could have been a mock mental warfare simulation by Dharma and the U.S. Military.
It could have been an imaginary dream of a coma patient.

Or it could be our reality which itself is not real.

Scientists work to find out how our world actually works.
Recently at the American Museum of Natural History, scientists debated whether or not the universe is a simulation. The answers from some panelists may be more comforting than the responses of others.

Physicist Lisa Randall said she thought the odds that the universe is not "real" are so low as to be "effectively zero."

But on the other hand, celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who was hosting the debate, said that he thinks the likelihood of the universe being a simulation "may be very high."

The question of whether or not we know that our universe is real has vexed thinkers going far back into history, long before Descartes made his famous "I think therefore I am" statement. The same question has been explored in modern science fiction films like "The Matrix" and David Cronenber's "eXistenZ."

But most physicists and philosophers agree that it is impossible to prove that we don't live in a simulation and that the universe is real. Tyson agreed, but said he would not be surprised if we were to find out somehow that someone else is responsible for our universe.

If someone else is responsible for our universe, then we would call those persons or things gods.

In any higher order planetary relationships, the most intelligent, strong, technological and adaptable species are the alpha species who can assert their will on the rest of the known world. In human evolution, mankind had to have come to the realization that it was the alpha species. But instead of adopting a self-sufficient, own legacy approach to species self-esteem, ancient and disconnected cultures adopted religion and worship of superior beings as being responsible for their own self-awareness and life cycles.

Some could argue that religion is a pagan belief system because they did not have the means to investigate their true world. Except, that ancient cultures did have the brain power to solve and predict thousand years of  astronomical cycles with the accuracy of our current atomic clocks. Ancient people were more well versed in nature and the effect of cycles on human existence. They were the first to understand and to ponder the question of whether we are alone in the universe.

Ancient Egyptians constructed the pyramids in 20 years. Our modern technology cannot replicate that feat. Generally, the public does not think ancients were very advanced in their thinking. But they pondered the same "big" questions we do today.

ALCOHOL

Alcohol is God's apology for arranging our lives back to front. - - - James May