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Originally Posted by debdodd  so Og, once your heart stop beating, your brain cells die, it's over finito ... but how long before a person is actually "dead"?
I know they have done studies that have said that once your heart stopped beating you actually "go on" living for a while ..... what are the learned opinions on that? I can't remember where I read it or just what but you would be the most likely to know the answer around here ..... |
There's no line where you can say "dead vs alive." Life is no different than a rock or a tree or a star. It's an animated form of matter with highly specific signal transduction tools at its surface (senses) and a processing system inside.
The notion that it's a separate thing with an intrinsic identity that can "end" doesn't make much sense when talking about life/death/ghosts/etc. This is one of those reasons that shows like the terminator and stargate really annoy me. In the temrinator, the boundary of the body is understood as the intrinsic self. When they're sent back in time, all but that boundary and what is contained inside is sent (i.e. they show up naked).
When your heart stops beating, oxygen stops going to your brain. Cells in your brain rapidly die and cease to function. It's NOT a clean process, so parts of your brain start dieing first and these parts stop sending their signals into other parts and you get all manner of confusing signals going on as your brain shuts down (i.e. near death experiences).
There's nothing "finito" about it, in my opinion. That my sensory inputs stop functioning and that my synapses no longer retain signals from the past is not all that important. There's definitely nothing that "leaves" your body. You can watch any alsheimer's patient to see how this is the case. They have a slow degradation of their brain over time as plaques build up and block off synapses and kill neurons. You can watch these patients and see a successive deconstruction of an individual human being into nothingness.
Death is just a rapid version of that. But how is that "finito?" Certainly your body won't process sensory information around it, but so what? Are you partially dead when you become blind or if you get amnesia? I just think that life/death is poorly understood because people don't understand biology.
In my opinion, we are all flowers that blossom out of the world and are entirely constructed by the world. We are the "fruit of the earth" so to speak. There's nothing intrinsic about you and me. Ultimately, we're all one process. Death is just a state transition. Fundamentally, there's no difference between a rock, the ocean, a star, or a human.