If you transplant a human head, does consciousness follow?

The monkeys who did survive White’s surgery could not move their new bodies. How did this affect potential human patients?

I’m not going to, but if I were to take your head off (sorry), we’d be severing your spinal cord. Which means even if I put your head on someone else, and I reattach all of the blood vessels, and it feeds your brain, and your brain is awake and alive, and your face can move and all that. Your body still can’t. So a lot of people were saying: “What’s the utility here? Why do you want to perfect transplanting a human head?” White had lots of reasons for why he wanted to do it, but no one was really sufficiently convinced by any of them to say this is worth risking someone’s life. So it’s a peculiar story because it’s not, “Oh, it turns out, we can’t do the surgery.” It turns out we can, but we probably shouldn’t.