When Are You Dead?

When Are You Dead?

www.alternet.org

This is a tricky question, where science and religion often hide, or collide. It’s answered in a diversity of ways by different cultures at different times, by different physicians in different hospitals, different shamans in different tribes. Is it when your heart stops working (as in Japan and Shintoism)? When your soul leaves your body (as in Tibet and Buddhism)? When your brain stops working? When a certain part of your brain stops working? Who decides when you’re dead?

Can you be dead in body, but not in mind? Vice versa?

Cogito ergo sum?

(visit the link for the full news article)

First off before I continue...I am using only the first part of the title of this article...."When are you dead? Science just made the work of religion a bit more difficult"...because I thought the rest of it utterly unnecessary and misleading to boot...and if you read the article you will see why.

To quote from further on down the article (the original is from the New England Journal of Medicine which I do not subscribe to) it says:

Martin Monti and his colleagues in Belgium. They add a new test for consciousness, applied to fifty-plus folks in a proclaimed vegetative state. Monti et al., using an MRI machine (which monitors for active neurons in the brain), watch these folks’ brains when they are asked a question. And, amazingly a handful of the patients’ brains light up ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ just like your brain or mine would if we were asked a question. These folks are thinking—they are responding to a specific question. They are not vegetables after all! Or at least I don’t think so.

Now note it said a handful not all. Still its interesting. And it opens up all sorts of issues.

Now why do I say the rest of the title is misleading? Because no one claims that a person in a persistent vegetative state is dead that I have heard of...their body lives...barely with machine help usually...but the argument regarding disconnecting usually centers on whether they can ever be revived...quality of life...suffering of the family.

We know when someone is dead usually.

www.alternet.org
(visit the link for the full news article)

[edit on 3/12/2010 by iMacFanatic]

The only way to really answer this is to first ask the person whose life it is how they define life in general. I would guess that defining death is a very personal decision just as heavy as defining life.

For me, I have no desire to "live" as a vegetable, whether brain scans say I am functioning or not. Further, I have no desire to miraculously wake up in 20 years -- having missed everything in between -- because I can not handle the amount of pain my family would have gone through in the process.

As far as I am concerned, I am officially dead as soon as my heart stops beating, my lungs stop breathing on their own, and my brain shuts down and prevents me from enjoying everything that life, to me, is.

If any of my major organs need a machine -- heart, brain, lungs -- consider me on my way to the next journey....

I have an advanced directive with the VA about that very thing. If there is a reasonable chance of me surviving and having a decent quality of life afterward make an effort but if it is just to keep my body alive...let me die and harvest what organs are usable then donate my body to science.

Too bad this thread isn't going anywhere. Its an interesting development.

Even though only a small percentage of the people scanned had any brain activity it would have cleared out a lot of nonsense from the Terri Sahvio case...

but then probably not it was as much political and religious as it was medical.