While I was waiting for my mythical piece in The New Atlantis to come on line (Real Soon Now) I was looking over the spring issue, and found this piece on the legal definition of death. His purpose is to define when it’s morally acceptable to harvest organs, but I don’t think that it will work as well for cryonicists (a subject I discussed several years ago). The problem with the legal definitions is the word “irreversible.” It’s not really possible to know prospectively whether or not a given biological state is irreversible, because this is an ever-moving target and a function of available technology, whether in your geographical or temporal location. As I noted in my cryonics piece, many conditions that would have been considered “irreversible” in the past (e.g., cessation of respiration after drowning) can now be routinely reversed, without even special tools–just knowledge of CPR.
The only truly definitive definition of death is the concept of information death, in which the ashes of the brain are scattered to the winds. And the fact remains that death is a process, not a discrete event, and as technology continues to advance it will be possible to reverse it as we go deeper and deeper into the process.
I’ll go you one further, Rand… some suppositions:
1) In the far future the brain will be completely understood. Brain scanners can completely describe the processes/structure. (Think of the uploadable brain)
2) In the far,far future, the brain will be uploadable from a distance. As time goes on, that distance will increase. (Sensors get good enough to intuit the brain processes/structures from emissions)
3) In the far,far,far future, the brain will be readable/uploadable from astronomical distances. Someone will point the brain slurping telescope at a black hole, and upload everyone that has ever lived.
No one is irreversibly dead.
The simple prayer “Remember me, Lord” acquires a certain poignancy if the remembering can include the entire molecular structure of the human body, sufficient to emulate the person who is praying.
Star Trek transporter technology certainly offers fodder for interesting theological speculation.
Perhaps divinity is nothing more (or less) than genuinely infinite bandwidth.
Someone will point the brain slurping telescope at a black hole, and upload everyone that has ever lived.
That’s based on the assumption that somehow information can survive entry to and stay coherent within a gravitational singularity (And that such information gathered by your magic telescope can move faster than light.)
And how would that be any different that having a machine that can view any moment in the past, at any location?
Actually, the whole idea of thinking about the dead as merely a source of spare parts is what’s creepy about the whole discussion. Someone’s gotta die to supply that liver or heart, and so when you hear someone talking about “hoping for a transplant”, they are hoping someone dies you they can live.
Maybe that’s why our culture has developed this fetish/fascination with vampires and zombies and other mythical creatures who look like are were human who live off the death of human. (If it was just about killing and eating people, then there’d be a similar love for grizzlies and polar bears and cougars and wolves… Oh, right…)
The Undead LIVE!!!!
Actually, the whole idea of thinking about the dead as merely a source of spare parts is what’s creepy about the whole discussion. Someone’s gotta die to supply that liver or heart, and so when you hear someone talking about “hoping for a transplant”, they are hoping someone dies you they can live.
Well the body is a machine. This is just treating it like one. What I consider fortunate is that we’re very likely to leave this era of human organ harvesting behind by growing replacement organs ourselves. I imagine a number of people here are familiar with Larry Niven’s science fiction on the matter.
In some of his stories, organ harvesting reaches an extreme. With enough supply, one can prolong one’s life span by a century or more, replacing parts as they wear out. The problem is that for a person to live to say, two hundred, they have to go through several of each type of organ: hearts, livers, skin, spare limbs, etc. That means you need supply of these organs. The end result is that an elite gets the pick of organs, everyone else gets to enjoy uncertain waiting lists, and a bunch of minor crimes suddenly become capital crimes (so that the organs from the criminal can be harvested to supply the huge demand). At one point near the end of this era in Niven’s stories, jaywalking becomes a capital crime purely in order to supply organs. The system breaks down when artificial organs start competing with the natural ones.
If we were in a similar situation, then death would be easy to define. It’d be the point that the state or someone else harvests your organs.
How about the Jewish definition of death, when you start stinking up the place; which also applies to in-laws that overstay their welcome and the homeless.
It’s interesting that most religions I know of consider consciousness to continue after death even though scripture says the ‘thoughts do perish’ at death.
Organs obviously continue to live after the death of a person for a time. So you could slice and dice me, but as long as I continue to think I am not dead. But if you could transfer my thoughts into another body or machine, would that be me? Multiple me? Experience would diverge at that point, but who gets the drivers license and social security number?
Raoul,
That’s based on the assumption that somehow information can survive entry to and stay coherent within a gravitational singularity (And that such information gathered by your magic telescope can move faster than light.)
Um, no. I was referring to gravitational lensing. Sorry, I thought the idea was old hat at this point. You find a black hole X light years from Earth. You look at it’s edge with a big honking telescope. You see a mildly distorted image of Earth, as it was 2*X years ago.
To draw in my point, you then “read” the brainwaves of someone that you focus your telescope on right before they die.
All of the work going into suspended animation (apparently possible with mice, at least, given a bit of hydrogen sulfide and a very low oxygen environment) will have a profound effect on the definition of life. If you can take a dog, cool it to room temperature, stop its heart, drain its blood, mutilate it, repair it, re-fill it with blood, and have it come back to life (this has been done several times by one of the research groups), was the dog “dead” during any of this? What if you just don’t do the last couple of steps? Is it now dead? These questions make the “total brain death” question look easy…
Here’s the thoughts of one (now cryosuspended) man:
http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/24thcenturymedicine.html
“(If it was just about killing and eating people, then there’d be a similar love for grizzlies and polar bears and cougars and wolves… Oh, right…)”
Thus the annual (though it feels like it’s more often) ‘Shark Week’ on the Discovery Channel. I mean, they never have a ‘Goldfish Week,’ right…?
I wonder how long after your circulation stops that the brain degrades enough to make memories etc unrecoverable even by artificial means? Obviously if you can’t recover them by reviving the person, your brain dead even if they heal the dead brain. (Ok, the body with new blank slate brain would be called amnesiac you, but really it isn’t.) But if the dead brain could be read to enough detail to recobsrtuct the info you could say your still potentially recoverable – if not in the same biological brain.