DEATH

Death? Yes, Death. Ahhh.. One of my favorite topics! Death, so tragic for other people, yet so facsinating for some. What is the right approach to death? Have we ever asked ourselves? after all, it's inevitable, so why run from it? Embrace!







What is Death?

The term ‘death’ is ambiguous. The ending of life is one thing, and the condition of having life over is another. ‘Death’ can refer to either. Let us add that ‘the ending of life’ is itself potentially ambiguous. In dying, our lives are progressively extinguished, until finally they are gone, in a process that stretches out over a period of time. This is true even if death is a threshold concept, so that a sufficiently substantial extinction of life must occur before death takes place. ‘The ending of life,’ hence ‘death,’ can refer either to this entire process, or solely to its very last part — the loss of the very last trace of life. Thus death can be a state, the process of extinction, or the denouement (final completion) of that process. Death in all of these senses can be further distinguished from events — such as being shot with an arrow — that cause death.




The Permanence of Death

‘Death’ is also unclear in at least two ways. First, the concept of life is not entirely clear. For example, suppose we could construct a machine, the HAL 1.01, with (nearly) all of the psychological attributes of persons: would HAL 1.01 be alive? We might well consider HAL 1.01 alive, but this choice is not legislated by the concept of life. To the extent that we are puzzled about what life entails, we will be puzzled about what is entailed by the ending of life, that is, death. (Would HAL 1.01 die if switched off or disabled?) Second, it seems somewhat indeterminate whether a temporary absence of life suffices for death, or whether death entails a permanent loss of life. For practical purposes, whenever a creature loses life the condition is permanent; so ‘death’, as commonly used, need not be sensitive to the distinction between the temporary and permanent ending of life. Yet in thought experiments we can imagine the temporary loss of life. Suppose, for example, that I were frozen and later revived, as is sometimes done to simple organisms: it is tempting to say that I cease to be alive while frozen — I am in a state of suspended animation. Or imagine a futuristic device that reduces me to disconnected atoms which it stores and later reassembles just as they were before. Many of us will say that I would survive — my life would continue — after the reassembly, but it is quite clear that I would not live during intervals when my atoms are stacked in storage. In these cases, our linguistic intuitions give no definitive verdict concerning the applicability of ‘death’. On the one hand, it seems appropriate to say that I die when my body is completely frozen or my atoms are disconnected, since the term ‘death’ seems applicable when a creature's life ceases. On the other hand it seems correct to deny that I die, since my life is eventually restored, and ‘death’ seems applicable only when a creature's life is permanently ended. Nonetheless, once we allow our competing intuitions to work themselves out, we are likely to conclude that the permanent ending of life more fully captures what we mean by ‘death’; hence in what follows we may as well adopt this approach.

According to some religious traditions, people's lives need not permanently end when their bodies break down. There are two main competing ideas about how life may continue. First, our physical demise could be temporary, since God might resurrect our bodies (restoring our mental life in doing so). Second, our lives may continue uninterrupted, assuming we are souls who survive the demise of the body. Proponents of the first idea of the afterlife sometimes apply ‘death’ to the breakdown of bodies, and proponents of the second sometimes apply it to the soul's departure from the body, but both groups presumably will also acknowledge that ‘death’ would apply to the permanent ending of life (even though they would deny that such death is inevitable).




Death and Existence

May a creature continue to exist for some time after its life ends? We commonly refer to ‘dead animals’ (and ‘dead plants’) which may suggest that we believe that animals continue to exist, as animals, while no longer alive. The idea, most likely, is that an animal continues to count as the same animal if enough of its original components remain in much the same order, and animals continue to meet this condition for a time following death (Mackie 1997).

May people exist for some period after their lives end? Confusingly, the term ‘person’ may be ambiguous, applying to creatures with psychological attributes such as self-awareness, or to human beings which may lack these. To avoid confusion, we shall employ ‘person’ only in the first sense. We can use the term ‘human being’ for humans who may or may not have psychological attributes.

Presumably in asking whether persons may exist after their lives end we mean to ask whether they may survive as persons after their lives end. Perhaps, insofar as we are animals (as animalists, such as Snowdon 1990 and Olson 1997, suggest), we may persist for a brief time after we are no longer alive, given that animals persist for some time as corpses or carcasses, according to some theorists (Feldman 1992, Mackie 1997). But even if we may exist after death as animal corpses, it does not follow that we may exist after death as persons. Assuming that personhood entails the possession of psychological attributes, and possessing these requires being alive, we cannot continue to exist as persons when our lives end.




Death and Personhood

There is good reason to distinguish between our deaths as persons and the body's demise. For persons may cease to exist (thus die) while their bodies survive, and persons may survive the demise of large parts of their bodies. Insofar as we are persons, death means the destruction of our identities. Hence further clarifying what it is for a person to die entails clarifying what is essential to a person's identity (Green and Winkler 1980), how identity is instantiated in particular structures, and what is involved in the breakdown of those structures. This is a complicated matter, which we must leave largely unexamined (see Personal Identity). But a couple of points are in order.

First, theorists such as Derek Parfit (1984), building on the work of John Locke (1689), have made a strong case for the view that psychological attributes such as memories and character traits, which change gradually over time, are central to our identities (see the essays in Perry 1975). Two separate but related ideas of identity vie for our acceptance: identity as connectedness requires that one's psychological profile not change significantly over time if one is to remain the same person, while identity as continuity allows changes in one's profile so long as these are gradual. According to the first idea, we can gradually lose our identities; identity is a matter of degree, since we retain our psychological attributes in varying degrees. By the second idea, identity is all or nothing; we either remain the same person or we do not; either there is not more than a gradual change in our psychological profiles or there is. Hence if we think of identity as connectedness, we will conclude that death, too, can come in degrees, and becomes complete when our psychological profiles are greatly altered or destroyed. If we think of identity as continuity, we will be more inclined to say that death is all or nothing — that people live through gradual, but not sudden and drastic, psychological changes.

Second, it is important to distinguish between the concept of death and a criterion for death. The concept of death says what death is. One such concept is that of the cessation of personal survival. A criterion for death, by contrast, lays out a condition that is sufficient for death and by which an individual's death may be determined. The traditional criterion says that you will be dead when your heart and lungs cease to function (not that death is cessation of respiration and cardiac functioning). A more recent criterion is brain death — meaning the death of the entire brain — since the brain is the seat of our psychological features. The brain death criterion is more accurate since, with modern technology, respiration and blood circulation can be maintained artificially even when the brain is dead. As things stand, authorities in the legal and medical context frequently rely on the brain death criterion (President's Commission, 1981). For example, tissues are not to be harvested from organ donors unless the entire brain is dead. But there is good reason to consider a person dead even if certain parts of the brain are still alive. Psychological attributes are most closely associated with the higher brain (the cerebral cortex). Unsurprisingly, then, there is increasing support for a higher brain criterion for death, according to which death occurs when the higher brain is no longer alive. But while higher brain death is a sufficient condition for a person's death, it is not a necessary condition. Conceivably, the higher brain might live through damage or alterations that destroy our psychological profile; if so, we might die as persons while the higher brain remains alive