Everyone has, at some point, heard a story about someone whose heart has stopped, but was quickly resuscitated. When referring to these people we often say “they were brought back to life”, but were they really ever dead in the first place? A person is considered to be clinically dead when their breathing and blood circulation stops while undergoing clinical death, a persons’ organs are damaged by ischemia (lack of oxygen due to stopped or restricted blood flow). Eventually, the body becomes irreparable due to ischemic injuries and cannot be resuscitated, but the rate at which this occurs varies from organ to organ. Limbs, tendons, skin, and bone can last for hours without oxygen before becoming unsalvageable if kept in the right conditions, but the brain undergoes rapid cell death and injury in a matter of minutes, however, some injured cells take long enough to die that a person has time to be resuscitated at which point there is some time to prevent their death while the person is “living.” As long as the organs, especially the brain, are still salvageable, the person can recover, therefore they aren’t truly dead. So you’re not dead when your breathing and heart stops, you’re dead when enough of the cells are dead for your brain to be beyond repair.
The problem with that definition is that it is entirely dependent on our current level of medicine and technology. As we advance in these fields, we’ll be able to further push the line of when you are considered to be dead. Perhaps many years from now a person can still be brought back as long as they have one still living brain cell, after that, perhaps they’ll only be dead once all their brain matter is completely gone and decayed, farther than that, death may not even be considered a meaningful transition, simply a temporary setback.
Regarding the question of “when does a person actually die”, we can’t truly know yet. Is death purely determined by how advanced our medicine is? Does “dead” really just mean “we don’t have the technology yet”? Is death a concrete, definite state? Are living things even meaningfully distinct from nonliving things when everything is made of the same atoms?
Your question is both a scientific and philosophical one. Once we are able to cheat death, and essentially nature, do we cross the line of what is considered "right" and all that that subjective term means? I foresee a future where stem cells can be used to revive damaged brain cells and other tissue around the body to restore a person that had been expired for longer than we would consider viable to resuscitate today. I just feel that when my time comes I would like to peacefully go, rather than prolong my life unnaturally. There's no point in fighting nature. Anyways, death complements our lives. Without our mortality, humans are incomplete as a journey with no end isn't a journey.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to agree with you, but whenever someone mentions something along the lines of death giving our lives meaning, I can't help but wonder if that's really true, or just something we tells ourselves to find comfort in a fate that was once seemingly inescapable? Maybe it's just a sentiment from a less advanced time that we've grown comfortable in, and now that there's potential for change, we fear what we may leave behind.
DeleteDeath is a pretty interesting topic. It was very interested to learn more of the scientific aspects that you provided in this post. It's crazy to think that potentially one day death might not be a concept but I honestly think that more people would rather transition peacefully then be kept alive like some cyborg. There are so many questions that would have to be answered and also people may not want to preserve themselves because their religion prohibits it. It is a very interesting topic for sure.
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