In a truly “brain dead/minimal brain function” situation, it’s only base functions and everything is kind of a reflex. The nervous system still works but there isn’t a person to give an output.
Pain technically isn’t a real thing but we feel it. It’s our brain saying “hey stop that! It could possible damage my vehicle” or “I’m going to eject some fuel from my vehicle, here’s a warning for all of the vehicle’s systems.”
Think of “brain dead” as having a computer without an OS or maybe there’s a missing BIOS. Like you hear the computer fan running but that’s about it. Who we are stored in the tissues of our brains, the CPU/motherboard/RAM/Memory all that combined. When the tissues of the brain are starved of oxygen, those tissue die and all that data is lost. What’s left of the brain and nervous system can only do whatever functions it still has the remaining data to do.
There may be the infrastructure for the input/output to run the process that we feel as pain but there’s no program linking it all together.
I mentioned reflex earlier because you may stimulate a possibly “brain dead” person and they may move, but that doesn’t mean they are what we would consider alive. I don’t want to traumatize anyone, so I won’t post videos, but a good way to better understand the concept is looking up “agonal breathing”. The person is gone, but the brain/nervous system’s base emergency programming tells it to go into survival protocol anyways. If you get knocked out you can do a form of agonal breathing and respond to pain stimuli to help you avoid further damage until you wake up. We see fighters looking like they’re having seizures (limbs stuck mid movement) and gasping for air because their brains went into survival mode, to protect itself and avoid further damage, even though their brain fukks itself over by stiffening the body.
Sorry for the roundabout explanation
to the iron sheik for that get-well shoutout.
There's the camera there."
