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Well. I believe it's totally possible to animate the body to an extent after death. But the totality of the individual, the consciousness, is gone. No going bac
by rafaelvasco 7y ago
Well. I believe it's totally possible to animate the body to an extent after death. But the totality of the individual, the consciousness, is gone. No going back; Either it merges back with the Universe, or goes to heaven, or fades away to nothing. Whatever you believe, it's gone. As someone famous (Lavoisier) said though: "Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed." I guess the "fades away to nothing" is the only impossible option;
- uryga 7y ago> the totality of the individual, the consciousness, is gone why is it gone? not necessarily disgreeing, but i'm curious
- kpU8efre7r 7y agoI think they mean gone as in not returning to that individual. It has gone somewhere.
- izzydata 7y agoAs in the neural pathways of the brain degrade to the point that no longer resembles human intelligence? I don't think most people here are going to believe in a spark of consciousness that breaths life into the brain.
- TaupeRanger 7y agoNeural pathways are just pathways. The electrical patterns that reside in the interactions between neurons are necessary for conscious experience. Once the patterns are gone, information is lost. It is like taking a snapshot of a table of moving billiard balls. You only have the position of the balls, but not the velocity, acceleration, etc. And those are necessary to recreate the motion. The "motion" in the case of the brain is what creates the person (as far as anyone currently knows). Having the dead neurons and their dead connections is not enough.
- UnFleshedOne 7y agoI don't think that's accurate from what we know currently -- there might be a minimum level of activity necessary to restart the system, but I think we know only upper bound of that (whatever they get with general anesthesia). But a lot of motions can be removed and then restored. Maybe if you take a snapshot of that billiard table, then recreate static picture of that and just bump all the balls randomly, they will settle on similar movement patterns the original system had.
- Felz 7y agoThat doesn't seem true? Short-term memory is encoded in transient electrical patterns, but long term memory definitely is not. You definitely don't lose your personhood if you suffer an interruption to short term memory, or else everyone who's ever had a seizure is already dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory#Long-term_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory#Long-term_memory
- TaupeRanger 7y agoWe actually have no idea how memory is encoded in any way - but that is irrelevant. When a person has a seizure, the electrical activity continues and is able to revert back to previous patterns through self correcting/preserving measures. My comment was referring to a completely dead brain with no activity whatsoever.
- z2 7y agoIt all hinges on if brain death is the complete annihilation or degradation of the soul that lives on it, or not. One is gone to the extent that the patterns of information that live in the brain and comprise the individual are permanently gone, and not just on pause after what is today considered neurological death. If that fire (and the entire structure, really) isn't completely put out, maybe it's possible to re-kindle it? As a tangent, Ted Chiang has written a wonderful sci-fi short, on a very mechanical parallel world that touches on this very non-mechanical topic: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]