Definition Of Death

If we can define what can die, we will know what is alive.

(moved from DefinitionOfLife, because that page is getting TooBigToEdit .)

Death is the destruction of a living entity.

Destruction is the one-way transformation of an entity into something fundamentally different.

- Does the transformation of a worm into a butterfly count as the worm's death?

An entity is an object, either physical or mental.

And alive is defined at the top of the page. At DefinitionOfLife, surely? This bit seems to have lost the original context.

There are only a few complications due to imagined entities. A sculpture can die if it was imagined to be alive, et cetera. But a little thought should make it clear that the complexity and ambiguity lies in the concept of life, not in the concept of death.

Death is an exceedingly simple concept whereas life is an exceedingly complex one. For that reason, it was absurd to believe you could define life in terms of death. Death simply isn't big enough a concept to contain the complexity of life.

That which can die must be alive. Every living thing (that we know of) will die. Therefore if you define the transition to death you create a category for life.

An anal pedant could always point to the symmetries of mathematics to prove that you can define death directly and then define life simply in terms of death. But that's missing the point entirely. The human mind simply doesn't work that way.

Mine does. Have you been unusually exposed to death?

Life is what you encounter every day on its own terms whereas death is something you only ever encounter in relation to life. This is why the concepts, and therefore their definitions, are balanced the way they are.

I always have to wonder about people who don't, or don't want to, understand simple concepts. In this case, the actual usage of life and death in human experience. Refusing to accept the obvious doesn't mean a person is "deep". Rather, it means they're too ignorant to either accept or reject it and, usually, too stupid to realize their ignorance.

Imagine that they aren't stupid for a moment. Imagine that they entertain the possibility that our working definitions, our common sense, could be wrong. We don't think of thunderstorms as being alive, but we could be mistaken.

On what basis do they entertain such ideas? Definitions are wrong with respect to the concepts they describe. Concepts are wrong based on experimental evidence and theoretical usefulness.

For many reasons. My favorite is that common sense has been wrong so many times before.

The scope of words has nothing to do with common sense. Imagine, for a moment, that thunder storms are alive and we are not. Then I'm really just using the word "alive" to mean "atmospheric phenomenon", or perhaps something else, but with the same principle. That sort of not especially interesting. What is interesting is to ask, what charateristics unite the things we do call alive? The page DefinitionOfLife is about exploring that.

Does that include inanimate things such as ideas, or organizational things such as Corporations?

"inanimate" is a synonym for dead, so I wouldn't include that. But I wouldn't categorize ideas as inanimate. From where I sit corporations aren't just organizations, they are organisms. But I sit on a strange bum.

Wrong--- a rock is "inanimate." Road kill is "dead."

Merriam-Webster's thesaurus lists "inanimate" as a synonym for "dead".

A synonym isn't necessarily always substitutable for a word - given context, a synonym may be innapropriately used. That is, words can have more than one meaning, and a synonym is a similarity in a meaning.

The goal of this page is to define the transition of death, not the state of being dead or the set of dead things. What does it mean to die? Once we define that we can use it to define what can die and what can't.

You want to see the definition of death? The answer is written at the bottom of an active volcano.

No, I want to create a logical definition for death. I know what death is. I want to put it into words.

It is a semi-joke.

After an incredible effort, using technology borrowed from Dr Josh Keyes, our team managed to reach the bottom of Dukono and found nothing of the sort. It would have been helpful if you had been more specific.

Attempt by AonghusOhAlmhain: Death is the end of a sequence of failures which results in a previously living organism no longer exhibiting any signs of life.

Far too loose, I agree, but maybe somebody will be triggered to refining it?

When rebooting does not or cannot work anymore.

The old Commodore and Atari corporations are long since dead, but their liquidation left a big pile of intellectual property that's being passed around various corporations and lawfirms. And now Infogrames has renamed themselves to Atari, even though it's entirely possible that not one of its employees is at all responsible for anything Nolan Bushnell's company did. It is no more a rebirth than a man named Jes�s who owns a Bible is the Second Coming.

There was an old Internet company named Mindspring, which was acquired by Earthlink. And for a time, the part that was Mindspring stayed the way it was, with sacred CoreValuesAndBeliefs? and an atmosphere of enthusiastic employees who cared about customer satisfaction. This is compared with Earthlink, whose mission was essentially to buy out every local ISP in the country, many of which formed for no other reason than to sell out to a company like Earthlink. Resistance was futile, and the CVB's fell by the wayside, and employees became encouraged to cut corners and become more profitable at the expense of the customer. At what point in this process would one consider Mindspring to be dead?

<aside>Both Earthlink and Mindspring were RollUp?s. They eventually bought up so many independent ISPs that the only thing they could do was buy each other out, and then sell a controlling interest to Sprint. So the previous paragraph could be re-written as:</aside>

There was an old Internet company named Earthlink, which was acquired by Mindspring. And for a time, the part that was Earthlink stayed the way it was, with sacred CoreValuesAndBeliefs? and an atmosphere of enthusiastic employees who cared about customer satisfaction. This is compared with Mindspring, whose mission was essentially to buy out every local ISP in the country, many of which formed for no other reason than to sell out to a company like Mindspring. Resistance was futile, and the CVB's fell by the wayside, and employees became encouraged to cut corners and become more profitable at the expense of the customer. At what point in this process would one consider Earthlink to be dead?

What is it that goes away we when we die? If were are purely mechanical then why can't we just be patched up and restarted?

How do you know we can't, given sufficiently thorough patching up?

Good question. It's hard to answer because "sufficiently" is open ended and always begs a future when we have more technology. We know we can keep people on life support to keep the body alive, but there's nobody home. Why would that be if the body can still be made to function? If someone dies because of a liver failure why can't we just fix the liver and make them alive again?

We will. Someday death will be when we give up due to lack of funds.

A future where people could be sustained indefinitely, but their choices are still less important than their wallets. What a simultaneously hopeful and bleak vision.

I saw a show on TV about frogs. They hibernate; you know. But unlike bears, their hearts actually stop, and they don't breath for as long as the temperature is below a certain limit. For all intents, during this time; they (frogs) could fit the definition of death. It is the "temporary" nature of this condition that makes it something other than death. I saw the same show. The frogs don't just have their hearts stop; the whole frog freezes completely solid all the way through. Very impressive.

[Could, but don't. There is a large step between a state of hibernation and actual death (such as the life force leaving the body.) The frogs do not fit the definition of death when hibernating, they fit the definition of hibernating.]

"life force"? Can you quantify that, please?

What processes distinguish a hibernating (and frozen) configuration of matter from a dead configuration of matter? What's going on inside a frozen frog that makes it come to life again? Or is it just the state it's in when it thaws that leads to reanimation and not a continuing process?

The frog is alive because it's not dead yet.

Also, the frogs do not freeze all the way through, and there is a degree of chilling beyond which they do not revive on warming.

From DefinitionOfLife

On the other hand, people categorize some humans as "not alive" (in a common sense understanding) long before their medical death. There's the common threat "You're a dead man", and the movie "Dead man walking" (DeadManWalking?) about prisoners on death row. You must also realize that the medical definition of death has had major changes over the years -- when a human stops breathing, he is no longer considered medically dead. -- DavidCary

Those are clearly just expressions, though. If you ask someone if a prisoner on death row is alive, their answer will probably be yes, if only for the time being.

Even with modern technology, it's recognized that brain death is quite separate from body death. And if it were possible to scan a personality and implant it into a cloned body, then that person would not be dead (only suspended) even after their body's destruction. So there is a crucial difference between what happens to a person and what happens to their body.

Regarding what happens to bodies, the best way to think about it if the lungs stop breathing or the heart stops beating, is that the body is mostly dead, but can be resurrected with technology. The medical definition of body death refers to irreversible damage and changes every time our technology pushes back that point.

Note that even in the past, people distinguished between body death and person death. Since the body died but the person went on to the afterlife.

"That is not dead which can eternal lie, Yet with strange aeons, even Death may die."

-- H. P. Lovecraft

That's easy : Death = !Life

Which is especially useless in the context of the first line of this page.

Actually, this seems pretty obvious. Over time, your RAM/ROM/disks wear out. Eventually, some critical data cannot be retrieved. BrainDeath? is when your OperatingSystem crashes.

During gestation, your "self" is bootstrapped and your main update loop begins:

  main() { 
    while(1) { 
       getStimuli(sense_array, memory_func));
       doWackyStuff(neuron_array);
       ...
    }
    return *soul; /* FIXME: not supposed to get here!  */
  }

If this loop ever returns, your program terminates and you move on to the next server. Algorithms are in place to deal with minor corruption of the neuron array, but major corruption is likely to crash the program (f.ex. being hit by a truck).

So the definition of death is dependant upon the current quality of medical exception handling and a spiritual debugger?

CategoryDefinition