there are a lot of ways to define death and the topic is often pretty touchy especially in america and this phanaphobic society.
are you dead when your heart stops beating and your lungs stop inhaling?
are you dead when all your brain functions stop working and you enter a PVS?
or are you dead when you have not even enough brain functions to be a person anymore?
after everything ive heard, it has become apparent to me that death is a very peacefull thing when done naturally. if however tramatic, then it could be different. which thus brings me to this. in our society death is seen as a bad thing, but is it really a bad thing for the person dying?
the topic is deffinatly an interesting one and with these questions i will leave you all to discuss. religion may be a part of this but so help me god if this turns into a religious fight between athiest and christians like every other **** thread in WERP then im locking it.
I define death as a full-body shutdown, where the body ceases to function and there is a 0% chance of the body resuming work again. People use the brain, lungs, and heart as other ways of knowing death and that is only because they are three of the most important organs in our body. Without the lungs, you have 3 minutes; without the brain and/or heart, it's instantaneous.
Society views death as a bad thing simply because said person will no longer be with us. Naturally however, death is seen as a necessity, as it is the winter of the spring of new life. The earth cannot contain every organism living, or living would be chaotic. This is why death is a blessing of sorts. So the best thing society can hope for is that the death was quick, painless, and inconspicuous. Third one is iffy because we may want last minutes with our loved ones, but ehh.
To me I am dead when my brain stops working, if my body carried on you would not be alive, no personality, no thoughts, no emotion, your personality, your soul, if you will, would be gone, never to return, once this has happened you are but a shell, a horse without a rider, a pen without a hand. You would be a nothing, dead inside, once your dead inside your body could carry on forever, but what made you YOU would be gone.
Clinical death is defined as when your circulation breaks down. It can be reversible, given certain circumstances.
Brain death is defined by an irreversible breakdown of all of your brain functions. Vegetative functions can still go on and be clinically preserved for some time I think, though I'm not 100% sure.
The hearth has it's own pacemakers that go on working on their own for some time, so I think this isn't a criterium for brain death at all.
Because what you were saying is basically the same thing, we have no idea what lies beyond death (if anything) just as we had no idea what lay beyond birth
Death is the stop of "life", but in my opinion, how can one go from existence to non-existence? Your energy is probably merely getting transferred, hence many cultures belief in resurrection, although, it's nothing like the soul being resurrected, just the energy being moved somewhere else.
After you die, you still exist. The only difference is your body is no longer functioning. Eventually you decompose and the materials you were made from return to the universe. I guess once there is no trace of your DNA remaining, you no longer exist as your biological identity is gone.
I consider death to mean complete shut down of metabolic functioning.
I consider dead to be when the brain stops working and the rest of the body fails too. If somone appears dead because their body cannot move, their brain may still be alive. But once bothe have failed, then it's like you're officaly dead. To me.
In the realm of physics, when you die you win. The goal of all matter is to lose energy and become disorganized. You die when you're body's energy is converted into objects different from your body and your atoms break away back into the soil, coffin, or wherever else your body may be.
True death is when you no longer have a Soul. Or, to atheists, a mind. From this logic, you could say that someone who is braindead is dead. Therefore if you're retarded, you're half dead. And if you've lost your mind, and are in an insane asylum, you're dying. Death is undefinable because our minds cannot comprihend something that complicated. Truly only God could take no something like that, seeing as he invented it..... I wonder if he could invent a warpship..... Hmmmm....
True death is when you no longer have a Soul. Or, to atheists, a mind. From this logic, you could say that someone who is braindead is dead. Therefore if you're retarded, you're half dead. And if you've lost your mind, and are in an insane asylum, you're dying. Death is undefinable because our minds cannot comprihend something that complicated. Truly only God could take no something like that, seeing as he invented it..... I wonder if he could invent a warpship..... Hmmmm....
other than the digression at the end, that was pretty deep.
I think at a physical standpoint, death (natural) is just the body's cells are no longer able to reproduce, these sterile cells start deteriorating because they can't renew themselves with mitosis, and thus as the cells fail, so do the tissues, then the organs, then the organ systems, and then with the light in your head burning out, you go along with the last organ system to fail, the brain.
