Brain medical question...

[Singular Intellect]

I've been pondering this interesting question for awhile.

Given our most advanced and capable medical technology today, would it be at all possible to completely remove a human brain from a human body and keep it alive and healthy by purely artificial means?

Under the pretense this is possible, would the brain be considered a living person? A thinking individual?

[Eris]

With today's technology? No. We don't have any kind of "brain tank" to put it in, even if we could keep it alive through the process of removal. We can scarcely mess with brains even while they're in their cases. Right now we're probably decades or centuries away from anything like this.

If it were possible, however, I don't see why you wouldn't consider such a person a thinking individual. The brain is where thinking happens, after all. Likewise, it'd still be living tissue, simply by the stipulations of the thought experiment. Whether it's a person or not depends on what you take to be a person. If it's just something with, say, a certain level of recognisably conscious thought or some such, then why wouldn't it be?

[CaptJodan]

It would also, of course, be a unimaginably shitty existence. Sensory deprivation does bad things to people as is, and this would be a step above that if the person was conscious (which I'm assuming is the case here).