Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/06/death-a-process-not-a-point-says-cutting-edge-research.html
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Being conscious during cremation. Thanks for the new nightmare fuel!
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Supposedly the purpose of holding a wake was to make sure the guest of honour was well and truly ex.
Premature burial was a widespread fear in Victorian times, with some ingenious devices patented to allow the interree to signal that they weren’t quite dead yet.
Of course, now we have cell phones.
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Not really: “death” has always been the point at which you couldn’t be revived, and what constituted that point (and “revival”) changed over time because of the science and culture, so it’s been moving and often fuzzy. “For centuries” there’s been no consistent definition - at first, sufficiently depressed life signs were “death,” but instruments for hearing weak heartbeats and breathing were developed. Just stopping breathing was “death,” but then artificial respiration became a thing. Then having your heart stop was death, but cardiopulmonary resuscitation was developed. (Though, culturally, we still talk about heart stoppage as “death” and having “been dead for X minutes,” despite death, by definition, being the point at which you can’t be revived.) Then “brain death” became a thing, but the point at which that starts is very much context sensitive, as e.g. falling into a freezing lake can preserve the brain for longer while the heart isn’t beating, etc.
A distinct point of “death” is an arbitrary human invention, basically, and biology doesn’t give a fig about our desire for neat categories. The more we know, the messier it gets.
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I hope there isn´t such a thing like life after death. I wish I could have some rest.
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We’ve known this for years, surely?
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Well Miracle Max knew, but we can’t say about the rest of us…
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The article seems to conflate some quite different topics. One is the claim that consciousness is independent of and separable from the brain, and quite possibly immortal:
"I think in 50 or 100 years time we will have discovered the entity that is consciousness,” he told me. “It will be taken for granted that it wasn’t produced by the brain, and it doesn’t die when you die.”
The other is the interesting finding that brain activity of an unusual kind continues for a surprisingly long time – albeit one still measured in minutes – after the oxygen supply to the brain is cut off.
That finding is indeed intriguing, but it doesn’t – as far as I can see – offer any evidence for the immortality claim. About the most that can be said is that some kind of brain activity persists after cardiac arrest for longer than we thought. If reports from people who have had near-death experiences are to be believed, that activity may be perceived – as much as perception is possible – as pleasurable or at least not distressing. But that’s about all we can say with any kind of confidence.
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When I upgrade my sewing machine to one that does embroidery I’m going to turn this into something nice to hang on a wall.
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Yet another application for AI!
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If anything, while an incorporeal thinking thing is pretty resolutely unfalsifiable, evidence that important neural structures can be significantly more durable than expected if your dice roll right seems like circumstantial evidence against the need for one:
If it were the case that all the neurology suggested that degradation was rapid and dire once the overt life signs and stimulus responses stopped than you’d need to cast about for somewhere else that the person could be being stored to account for the rare-but-not-mythical cases where people manage to come back substantially intact after a period of unresponsiveness.
If there are circumstances where the neurological hardware actually stays looking pretty decent for a period of time there’s still a lot of unravelling around what exactly causes greater durability in some cases rather than others, and what’s going on when you’ve got the neurologically intact but unresponsive; but it makes the matter of “how did someone come back from that?” less fundamentally puzzling; since there’s actually still a lot of there there.
The independent-of-brain consciousness also continues to run into the problem that there are a wide variety of neurological mishaps that cause impairments, some of them fairly hazily understood; some at least nailed down fairly precisely to lesions in specific areas doing particular things. Sometimes the excuses for why that is come relatively easily to hand(well, the immaterial soul substance depends on the visual cortex to interact with eyes; so it won’t stop you from being blinded…); others are…less clear…like the personality changes and mood disorders that show up with frontal lobe damage and CTE. The story that the brain is what the immaterial substance uses to homunculus-puppet the body is one thing; but consciousness isn’t really separate from the brain if certain sorts of brain damage can significantly alter it; not just deny it information or impede its control of motor functions.
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Yes you have to go through the part where Death tells you everything wrong with you and your countrymen.
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Boy, it’s super-true when it comes to biology (and I curse the simplistic - and wrong - biology taught in grade school, that has led to a bunch of ill-educated but highly confident adults), but it’s really true about everything.
I’m suddenly reminded of something I read about a podcast where they had some kids interview various experts and some actors pretending to be experts on the same subject, to see if the kids could figure out who the real experts were. The kids always picked the fake ones - they had the simple, authoritative answers (which were wrong), whereas the experts talked about uncertainty and even not knowing an answer. (I think about that all the time, in relation to Republican voters…)
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