Dear Muneeb,

sorry for using words, which might have evoked religious context. My intention is just to emphasise the terms and not to invoke Religion of any kind.

Yet when I look at the very process of dying, I see more philosophical and legal questions than technicalities. For the technicalities, all the stages of dying can be easily determined by observation or with the help of medical instruments. But can death be reduced to a certain moment in time or is it rather a process? From the legal point of view (proclaiming someone dead) we accept the simplification of the single moment in time and use observation and instruments to determine that moment, when certain legally defined physiological status is attained. This is extremely important in organ donation, we need the donor “dead” as soon as possible to preserve as many organs as possible for transplantation.

Yet more than anything, death is a process, with various functions preserved for quite some time after the moment of ”legal death”. Remember those reports of dead kicking in the mortuary just before being laid into the grave?

When my time comes, just when exactly am I dead? Is it the moment the heart stops beating, when ECG observable brain signals cease, or at some other moment? Am I dead, when my brainstem stops working coordinately or when my occipital lobes stop working? These events do not happen at the same time.

Observable brain functions cease to exist after some 10 to 20 minutes of brain anoxia, while the brain cells themselves are metabolically alive for quite a few hours after the brain stops its observable activity. What happens to the person’s consciousness during this time? Am I still dying or am I outright dead?

What is the process of brain death after cardiac arrest and to which extent is this different from death induced by large scale brain ischemia or traumatic brain injury? What would be the last recordable thoughts in these cases? What kind of pain would I feel?

And last, but not least, the death is the inevitable end of every living creature and it deserves the same respect as the birth and all that happens in between these two moments. Therefore His Majesty. Dying in peace and without unnecessary pain is a part of our well-being. And would you not call dying decently in a circle of close friends, all accounts settled, all wanting relieved, a Paradise of sorts? No religion, just psychology.

The nature is a great inventor and currently the humans did not reach it, that is why is a lot of conditions up to present not fully understood, for example - vision process. I suppose that death belongs to this list.

That means we are just waiting for a certain level of understanding of the process of life. Once we do that, death will just be an option or may be a preventable reality. May be death will become history then.

His Majesty Death is going to stay a big mystery for the times to come just because life is too complex to be understood by humans in full.

That doesn't mean we are not able to find closer and closer approximations of what life and death mean. Yet these are only approximations to the biology.

What remains are the ethics, the feelings, the consciousness, the dignity, the beliefs we have, to name just a few. Maybe there's even the Paradise hidden in dying peacefully.

@Michal: I think I was asking the question in scientific domain. Religion can spell its charm but let us confine our discussion to science only. Thank you

Dear Muneeb,

sorry for using words, which might have evoked religious context. My intention is just to emphasise the terms and not to invoke Religion of any kind.

Yet when I look at the very process of dying, I see more philosophical and legal questions than technicalities. For the technicalities, all the stages of dying can be easily determined by observation or with the help of medical instruments. But can death be reduced to a certain moment in time or is it rather a process? From the legal point of view (proclaiming someone dead) we accept the simplification of the single moment in time and use observation and instruments to determine that moment, when certain legally defined physiological status is attained. This is extremely important in organ donation, we need the donor “dead” as soon as possible to preserve as many organs as possible for transplantation.

Yet more than anything, death is a process, with various functions preserved for quite some time after the moment of ”legal death”. Remember those reports of dead kicking in the mortuary just before being laid into the grave?

When my time comes, just when exactly am I dead? Is it the moment the heart stops beating, when ECG observable brain signals cease, or at some other moment? Am I dead, when my brainstem stops working coordinately or when my occipital lobes stop working? These events do not happen at the same time.

Observable brain functions cease to exist after some 10 to 20 minutes of brain anoxia, while the brain cells themselves are metabolically alive for quite a few hours after the brain stops its observable activity. What happens to the person’s consciousness during this time? Am I still dying or am I outright dead?

What is the process of brain death after cardiac arrest and to which extent is this different from death induced by large scale brain ischemia or traumatic brain injury? What would be the last recordable thoughts in these cases? What kind of pain would I feel?

And last, but not least, the death is the inevitable end of every living creature and it deserves the same respect as the birth and all that happens in between these two moments. Therefore His Majesty. Dying in peace and without unnecessary pain is a part of our well-being. And would you not call dying decently in a circle of close friends, all accounts settled, all wanting relieved, a Paradise of sorts? No religion, just psychology.

In evolutionary terms, death can be rationalized as part of the developmental cycle that affect an individuals within the species. Environmentally caused deterioration, replication issues etc. are just a few of the factors which make the reproduction and passing on genes to offspring a viable option for the species as a whole, thereby removing the focus from "eternal" life of an individual of the species.

Gravity = death and Death= gravity

I follow Michal Svoboda answer

I don’t believe death can be looked at through the lens of ‘science only’. While I do not personally believe religion has a place I do think faith/spirituality and consciousness inform the dying process and can impact on the experience of dying. This in turn can have an effect on the physical body and how life ceases.

I believe its a technical issue

The book "Homo Dues" by Yuval Noah Harari has a chapter dedicated to the issue. I think he makes sense !

Harbinder,

thanks for pinpointing the role of death in evolution. I'd guess we might start a whole new thread discussing just that. But without death of sorts, there would be no evolution. That's so clear and yet so broad subject that I wouldn't venture to that now.

Yvonne reminded me haven't tackled the very definition of death or better discontinuation of life yet. And this is where most difficulties start and where science/technology really meets philosophy (and maybe even religion, though I'd like to keep this one out as much as I can, though there is no doubt religion can inform our understanding of death in many ways).

On way to define death may be "irrecoverable ceasing of any metabolic activity of an organism". That fits well with most eukaryota (animals and plants), but ...

Enter prokaryota, where it is rather difficult if not impossible to distinguish the parent cell from its progeny. If one of two dies (i.e. is destroyed beyond recovery), how do we know was it the parent or the offspring? Is E. coli virtually immortal, yet ever changing beast?

Enter planta. The humble potato or noble ginger parent plant never ceases existence, but rather morphs to the new plant through rabbit or tuber. How death works there?

How about us, humans, on the other end of the spectrum? The "brain death" definition of death is frequently used in the legal, medical, and technical context, i.e. the human being is considered "beyond recovery", when their brain is damaged to the extent that gives no hope of any conscious living. Though the body might still be functioning thanks to the supporting apparatus, the physicians (or courts, or relatives) are free to switch off the life support, letting also the physical body die. Just when exactly that point of no hope happens in any particular case is the friction point between the health system, judiciary, ethics, and religion.

The understanding of a human being alive is tightly connected with consciousness, not that much with physical integrity of our mortal and fragile bodies. We feel free to amend our bodies with transplants and implants and yes, it's still us. But what if in the imaginable future we would be able to replace the entire failing body with synthetic parts or outright download our brains into a machine? Would it still be me or am I dead, though having the same thoughts? Remember Arnold Rimmer, the Hologram, of the Red Dwarf series.

All that said applies only to the (death of the) life we are familiar with here on Earth. Though the extraterrestrial forms of life might follow the Earth in that that the living things are many and distinct, and there is multitude of the species (though the chemistry may be completely different), how about Stanislaw Lem's living ocean in Solaris? A single beast surrounding the entire planet. A thinking soup of sorts. How would life and death work there?

Rgds

Michal

The final step of aging is death, which is just the separation of the Soul from the body. The body stays in earth and the Soul goes back to The Creator in the Eternal Paradise.

I believe it is important to distinguish between bodily death and whatever might it be that remains after the body dies. Bodily death is not that clear cut. I had the opportunity to interview someone after she was pronounced dead, death certificate was signed and family was called. She had all her faculties and her main concern was what purpose she had remaining to fulfill.

I've also interviewed people who had out-of-body experiences with and without a near-death experience. There's considerable evidence individuals are able to translocate. There is considerable verification of what individuals see beyond the capability of our senses. We find that hard to believe since it does not fit nicely into our current paradigm of what the body is capable of doing.

I've also interviewed family members and health professionals who report seeing a mist or smoke like substance leave the body at the time of death. So far this has not been reported with near-death experiences. An addition to this mystery occurred when a daughter reported her father's transitional lenses he had on in the house at the moment of death turn dark. There was no apparent sign of ultraviolet light entering the room.

Maybe some energy system continues to exist after bodily death.

Hi Madelaine ! Thanks for your comment. Your perspective is quite unique. I would love to know more about your experiences and about how you understand the concept of death. DO animals happen to go through the experiences you just described? What does it mean for a cat to experience such a phenomenon? Does it mean the same for bacteria?

If you have many interviews on the subject, do you think of analyzing all the collected work to write a book. Such a book will be very useful.

We are made of matter and energy. The energy, called subtle energy is invisible to us but we cannot leave without it. When a person is dying; the first part of the body to become cold are the feet and the last part is the brain. Based on the first law of thermodynamics; energy cannot be created and cannot be destroyed. Moreover, based on the second law of thermodynamics, the quality of energy; called exergy, can be destroyed. Based on these two laws of nature; when the quality of subtle energy is completely destroyed; we witness death.

Interesting question. While complete death (presumably, the death of every cell in an organism) is a process that may take variable amounts of time depending on conditions, it appears to be true, as far as we know, that all living things eventually succumb to total death (everybody dies). I have argued that the simple fact that all living things eventually die is the key determinant for evolution. In the simplest sense, reproduction is the process that makes it possible for living things to persist despite the fact that they all eventually die. But to persist in changing environments, typically over long time spans, natural selection and evolution become the key features (along with reproduction) that allow life to persist despite the fact that they all die. Therefore, it seems to me that without death, these beautiful things we know as reproduction, natural selection, and evolution probably would not exist and life would probably not exhibit the wonderful variations and diversity that we observe today. Personally, I believe that part of this 'evolutionary' process (reproduction) began even before the first true life forms developed from inanimate matter. True life forms appear to be those capable of storing and faithfully reproducing information that preserve structure and function but, most importantly, also allow for some changes to occur for adaptation. As far as we know, nucleic acid-based systems are the only ones that actually work. Therefore, I see death as a critically important technical feature that makes life possible as we know it. "Life is evolution" but death makes it all possible. Please see: Article Life is Evolution

Thanks Kaiser. Your perspective is quite informative!

Dear All,

I like all the great stuff we managed to gather here. The near death experiences have become widely publicised (and ridiculed at first) after Raymond Moody's 1975 Life after Life book. These days, however, a few attempts to explain the near death experiences using physiology and neurology, though with mixed success.

Big thank you to Madelaine for bringing in the first eye testimony of the Miracle of Resurrection. Again, there seems to be a bit of religious terminology, but how would we better describe a fact of a person rising from the dead?

Zin reminded me of other religious term - the Soul. But what the Sould really is? I am a sort of hard-boiled scientists, yet with personal experience of feeling the "Energy" (yet another word despised by "Scientists") and even using this "Energy" to the benefit of others. However, as a scientist, I try to stick to observation and creating testable hypothesis. Therefore, I'd like to put here some scientist's definitions, and I'd like to hear your comments.

A Miracle - a phenomenon defying explanation in the framework of current knowledge. Madeleine's observation comes to this category. Any Miracle should not be denied (save ridiculed) but rather investigated as it may open new vistas of knowledge. These days, physicists are looking for "a Miracle" with all their might to crack the doors into new physics.

The Soul - the part within us, which endows upon us the Maslow's topmost need of self actualisation. This motivation refers to focusing on becoming the best person that one can possibly strive for in the service of both the self and others. In that sense, the Soul might be also regarded as the divine spark within us, where divine means striving to serve the Universal Good and relieving all Attachments. Any similarity to the Golden Rule (Mt 7:12), "Love thy neighbour ... commandment (Mk 13:31), and the four Noble Truths of Gautama Buddha is by coincidence only.

The Death - we've done already a lot on, yet still not solved, I like Don's comment. Destruction of all cells in an organism bides well for animals and humans. May not work for prokaryota (bacteria, archea) and plants (at least some).

It seems even the concept of Brain Death might be soon dead and gone as well.

See Nature Comment - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04813-x (please scroll down a lot to the appropriate heading - Death, of course).

Which leaves me with Zin's definition as the only viable option. The Death comes when the Soul leaves the body for good. Whatever Soul means and wherever it goes after leaving the body.

Not very scientific definition, though. And definitely not a technical issue.

Thanks for this one! I will go through it and come back, probably with more doubts?

It seems we all somewhat agree Death being connected this or the other way with Consciousness. What is Consciousness seems to be one of the questions science has no answer to, yet some think there might the the light at end of tunnel, see https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05097-x.

Here's how bacteria die http://tinyurl.com/ybowk9lm

I think how bacteria die will be an interesting and fascinating probe to deal with. I will go through the links and come back with a lot of questions more.

Thanks

Hi All, a quite interesting article dealing with immortality (which seems to me the other side of death) has appeared recently https://www.future-science.com/btn/news/oct18/27

Another twist on the theme is in Erwin Schroedinger's 75 years old lecture - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06166-x

Hi Prof. Svoboda,

Could you please explain it? It will help us to discuss it further !