ForumsWEPRDeath (warning, possibly morbid topic)

9 3739
Strop
offline
Strop
10,817 posts
Bard

Following Brigadier's post on the Afterlife thread, I realised there's something we all talk about but never fully define.

Well, that can be said of a lot of topics, but the one I'm talking about is death. Recently, Pope Benedict XVI invited a small group of doctors to discuss what exactly death is and when it can be declared, because we are in a day and age where these definitions are important, but are even more difficult to find.

So all that said, what would your definition of "death" be?

  • 9 Replies
Navnlose
offline
Navnlose
109 posts
Nomad

well meny people would proberly say, heart stops working or stops breathing, but there is a disease which slows them both down so much that they are declared dead, yet are alive, need not to eat or drink, there bassicully a zombie, living but dead, but that can be treated if found. i think your dead once you have started to decompose, which only happens once your dead, another way i think is if you have lost or puntured major organs, and/or lost major amounts of blood.

Moegreche
offline
Moegreche
3,829 posts
Duke

Death is just yet another word humans try to use to relate to the world around them, but it is an entirely relative definition. The only people who can define death are those that haven't experienced it, which makes it doubly hard to define. You could list biological factors and things like that, but from a legal and a pragmatic sense death is defined when a doctor declares you dead. There are, of course, cases where people are declared dead when they're not, which seems to indicate that a reality exists beyond our definition; but that reality and the knowledge of death is entirely retrospective. You can only be sure of someone's death after quite a bit of time.

Megamickel
offline
Megamickel
902 posts
Peasant

I think that pretty much just ended the thread, though. Dang, I had something very similar ready to go before I saw that >_<

Asherlee
offline
Asherlee
5,014 posts
Shepherd

I agree with Moe (as usual), but I feel that the cessation of cortical functions is death. I mean without that brain you really are just a bag of bones and meat.

Brigadier
offline
Brigadier
51 posts
Nomad

It is an interesting thing to think about.

Humans are so used to their consciousness, they can't imagine life without being conscious.

When we die and our Heart Stops, Our Brain shuts down, and we stop breathing. I think we just lose all consciousness and just lay there in the ground forever. It's hard to tell as Moe said because no one currently Alive has experienced death to it's full extent.

We will never know what death holds for us until we reach it.

Sting
offline
Sting
266 posts
Peasant

Depends on your religion/views of the world, as do many controversal topics nowadays. Technically, it is when your heart ceases to beat, but like Asherlee said if your brain goes, that might as well be death (you would be unable to move, think, do anything at all).

And like Brigadier said, we will never know till we die. If a religion is correct, we will realize that instantly. If evolution is correct... well, we will not realize it because we would 'cease to exist', and therefore not have the consciousness to say "Evolution was right."

Megamickel
offline
Megamickel
902 posts
Peasant

Religion and evolution don't necessarily counteract each other, Sting. I'm a Christian and yet I tend to believe evolution is true - simply God's way of creating the world. You're thinking of atheism.

Sting
offline
Sting
266 posts
Peasant

I guess you are right, Megamickel, but most atheists believe in evolution, you know? I suppose you can still look at it the same way, just replace 'evolution' with 'God'.

Strop
offline
Strop
10,817 posts
Bard

Darn it, I was hoping that we'd get wrapped up in a conversation on continuity of being!

For example, in such fictional (and not necessarily fictional) concepts as cryogenic freezing, or some kind of suspended animation, or even say a brain transplantation...the questions that come up are supposed that one passes through a state of "death", does this mean the necessary end of the continuity of experience?

In the end though, that does come back to Moe's point about the experiential conundrum of death.

Showing 1-9 of 9