Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Where is the line between life and death? For centuries, it was pretty clear. You stopped breathing, your heart stopped beating, your brain shut down, it was off to the morgue. Well, now the science is showing that the demarcation line for crossing the River Styx may not be quite so clear cut. This piece in The Guardian looks at the latest science of death and near death:
"We are now at the point where we have both the tools and the means to scientifically answer the age-old question: What happens when we die?" wrote Sam Parnia, an accomplished resuscitation specialist and one of the world's leading experts on near-death experiences, in 2006. Parnia himself was devising an international study to test whether patients could have conscious awareness even after they were found clinically dead.
[...] The science nerd in me finds this fascinating; the science fiction nerd in me is now awake at night spinning out horrific tales of the nearly dead being unceremoniously disposed of while still quasi-conscious. I just decided on cremation.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday April 09, @07:30AM (1 child)
starts at birth. Birth starts at death.
(Score: 3, Touché) by RamiK on Tuesday April 09, @10:21AM
I think neutrophils start replicating from around the 1st-2nd weeks of gestation (google says they exist in the first trimester and that blood cells replicate from the first week so...) and only live for a couple of days so you're basically dying from well before you're even born.
compiling...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09, @09:05AM (20 children)
How are you going to test that? If you merely ask them, how can you be sure? It could be their memories getting random/different values during that process for other reasons than because they were actually aware.
In many cases the cells are dying or actually die.
Analogy, say I suspend a VM, tweak some of the memory values, restart it. How do you tell which memory values are because of the shutdown itself and which are because of the tweaks?
One possible method might be to have some sort of unique external sensed stuff. e.g. audible stuff that maybe they might hear while being half dead. But if it's too repetitive, people might hear it from other scenarios (other people dying, movies etc) and misremember/misassociate it when it's their turn. Also if it's too loud/obtrusive it might get in the way of the actual medical stuff. Are you going to strap on some stuff to a potentially dying person so they can feel unique touch patterns?
Of course just because they don't hear/sense it doesn't mean they're not aware. For me there have been cases where I'm near blacking out and my vision goes dark and my hearing starts getting a "waung" sort of sound. So I'm not sure if I'd be able to sense much external stuff when I'm unconscious/half dead.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by zocalo on Tuesday April 09, @10:06AM (4 children)
Also, if you accept that death is a process, the question still remains as to how do you even define the moment of death? People in cardiac arrest still show brain activity. Same for people who have stopped breathing. Maybe you, as a person, are "gone" with when ECG-detectable brain activity ceases? You're almost certainly no longer operating at a subconcious level, let alone thinking at a concious level, at that point, yet we're also a collection of independant microbes and bacteria that are demonstrably still highly active for several days after that (hence the reason why corpses bloat). We can't function without them, so they're an intrinsic part of what gives us life, so maybe there's a case that we're not entirely dead until their chemical activity ceases too. Perhaps the easiest line is that at which rescuitation is definitively no longer possible, but how you define that point, let alone how you might go about demonstrating it, I don't even want to imagine, although you could obviously caveat that with the phrase "using current techniques" and leave it more open-ended.
As TFS says, scientifically and philiosophically it's a fascinating topic, but also a rabbit hole down which lies some serious nightmares...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 09, @11:52AM
The reality of CPR is nothing like in movies and Television... CPR provides about 10% of baseline cardiac output, which is infinitely better than zero, but far from ideal.
Mammalian bodies are machines which are heavily dependent on constant blood flow, and gas exchange. Stop that blood flow without also stopping the myriad of chemical processes dependent upon it and damage starts to accumulate, some easily reversible, much not.
Consciousness is a higher order process that we still have a very limited understanding of, how consciousness changes in near death conditions is likely a highly variable experience dependent on both how the body is dying, as well as the mind's experiences both immediately before death and all through life.
The study in OP may find some interesting, potentially useful tidbits, but I highly doubt that they will discover anything approaching universal truths.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 09, @01:35PM (1 child)
FTFY
Does an Atlantic Salmon [doi.org] qualifies as a person?
When was the last time you had a check against severe hypoalcoholemia syndrome? I mean, taking life too seriously could be deadly condition to suffer on medium-to-long term, you could wake up dead one morning and not even know it.
:large-grin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Tuesday April 09, @01:37PM
Oh, shit. I intended to post the above as AC. Sorry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday April 09, @06:57PM
Even trying to draw a bright line of "using current techniques" won't work. Occasionally someone will beat the odds and spontaneously recover even after the doctors have given up on them. In other cases someone they're sure can be saved dies anyway.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09, @10:12AM (8 children)
I wonder if I will sense agonizing pain, even though it's just a perception.
I have been anesthesthesized with propofol. I seem to remember fine before and after, but not a thing during being put down.
I had my heart resynchronized involving a defibrillator. That should have been something to remember, but I can't remember anything. I don't know why I wasn't even sore. Incidentally I slipped back out of sync the next day... didn't stay in sync through the night.
Now, I have a strong belief in meeting my creator, and I know I fall far short of what I should be...My reality is only what I sense it to be. Time and pain. Knowing "hell" may be shutting down with the pain bit flipped ON and the system clock stopped. Eternity.
I flat do not know if shutting down is peaceful.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 09, @01:02PM (7 children)
>I flat do not know if shutting down is peaceful.
I don't think "alive" is a binary state. There is a clear zero "dead" state and most of us approach something like 100% alive for a while, but I suspect that the transition to absolutely "off" is a varied individual experience, with little correlation to how well you have met the expectations of anyone's idea of a Creator.
Now, in the hours approaching death, that time when priests deliver last rites, etc. I do believe that some people reflect on their lives, what they did and didn't do, and their inability to do anything more does existentially put that consciousness into a sort of eternal unchangeable state, that in my opinion exists entirely in the minds of the survivors after the passing.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Tuesday April 09, @01:53PM (1 child)
I don't see this study as proving or otherwise that there is a God. To me the religious aspect is irrelevant. All the stories tell me that 'something' is happening in the brain that we do not yet understand.
It might be, although this has yet to be investigated, that at the point that we currently think somebody is 'dead' might not actually be the case. Now today there is little we can do about it no matter what the actual point of true death is. But we once said the same about people who had a cardiac arrest - they were beyond all help. Today, we now know that not to be the case even if it is true for most cardiac arrest patients. We certainly said the same about open-heart surgery, heart valve replacements, major organ transplants, burns treatment, plastic surgery etc. Somebody made the effort to research the issue. Unless the research is carried out then we will not know at what point any further support is pointless, and we will stay with the arbitrary point that we have today.
I had to make the decision to end my wife's life support. It was the most terrible thing I have ever had to do and now, several years later, I still feel an intense guilt in case I made the wrong choice. My wife died with dignity and surrounded by those who loved her most - but that does not help assuage the feeling of guilt.
Doctors have always had to make such decisions based on what they know at that time. But over the last century or so that point of giving up treatment and declaring somebody as 'dead' has moved. CPR, easy-to-use defibrillators, treating battlefield wounds etc have all made tremendous progress and increased the odds of survival of some who would once have been left for dead. That some doctors WANT to know what is happening in the brain fills me with hope that perhaps in the future, and perhaps in conjunction with other developments not yet even imagined, it will be possible to improve the survivability of yet a few more people.
Everything that happens in medicine (and in many other areas of science too) was once nothing more that somebody asking the questions like "What if...?", "Would it be possible to....?" or "Can this even be done...?". Unless we look, we will never know.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 09, @03:07PM
>'something' is happening in the brain that we do not yet understand.
Until we transcend to a state where hundreds of millions of humans (or conscious beings of higher processing power and communication ability) are actually constructively, cooperatively, intensively studying the problem, I think we will always be in a state that 'something' is happening in the brain that we do not understand. Today I get the sense that we have a few dozens of cats randomly scratching their individual itches and sometimes meowing to each other about it - with not even an attempt to herd the cats toward a common goal.
Even when 'the collective' reaches a level of understanding, whether or not that can be explained to a single member of 'the collective' is debatable - like: can a worker bee really understand why the colony is doing what it is doing?
>Now today there is little we can do about it no matter what the actual point of true death is.
Well, if you want to go all sci-fi cryogenics about it, I subscribe to the 'mind and body are just a machine' camp and 'someday' there may exist the technology to re-animate you as a reasonable approximation of yourself, given enough data about what 'you' currently are. That is certainly far beyond anything we are approaching the capability of doing today, starting with the fact that we have no idea where or how the critical information that 'makes you you' is encoded. It's certainly somewhere in the molecules that make up your body, but just how much can that data be compressed? Even if we store the whole body in cryo-freeze, how much critical information is lost in the freezing process - similar to how the information on a sheet of newsprint is lost when it is burned? Just now, I'm having a thought that future Dr. Frankensteins may be sooner able to create an approximation of 'you' from photographs and videos of you in life, filling in the blanks with generic programming about how people 'like you' were in life based on more indirect information than anything regarding direct reading of physical matter that used to be your body.
>My wife died with dignity and surrounded by those who loved her most - but that does not help assuage the feeling of guilt.
My wife's mother lived in a nursing facility near us for six months, then moved 'back home' with her sister for her last 3 months of hospice care... I feel the most guilt about sending her to the house she used to live in to 'die naturally' with the hospice nurses (the last few days) virtually shoving pain meds down her throat until she stopped breathing. She went from a small positive quality of life to a deeply negative one, and it was mostly about how much supervision and care the family could afford. Her husband passed in the middle of the six months she was near us, complications from a tailbone fracture and the subsequent downhill ride that you go through later in life when something goes wrong... None of us live forever, and I strongly believe that there is an integrated curve of quality over time that should guide healthcare decisions - extending a negative quality of life that has no chance of recovery to a positive one isn't good for anyone, but neither is it possible to completely avoid negative quality of life at times - particularly near the end.
My mother's father had a good last year, they changed his meds and improved bloodflow to his brain dramatically, he 'de-aged' to a state like he was in ten or more years earlier - actively enjoyed his gardens and fishing and family and through that year he faced a relative certainty that the blood clots in his legs were going to return and he would be facing a decision: amputate or die. At 78 he chose not to open a new chapter of life in a wheelchair, a physical burden to everyone around him and unable to enjoy life as he knew it before. His doctor made statements like 'I absolutely disagree, when there is a path to preserve life you always take it.' but, reluctantly respected his patient's wishes. The worst part of that path was the two weeks he had to endure in hospice while gangrene set in and eventually killed him - that shouldn't be required by any system that calls itself "caring."
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday April 09, @02:15PM (4 children)
Is there? If your brain is digested by worms, do you become (part of?) the worms? Is the heat death of the universe a clear zero "dead" state, or is there no such thing [wikipedia.org]?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 09, @03:13PM (3 children)
I would say the "dead" state is that state in which your body is no different from any other inanimate organic matter. Yes, you are food for worms, you are not irrelevant, but you are inanimate and we (currently - Frankenstein pun intended) cannot change that.
Does that "dead" state happen the moment brain activity stops? Clearly not, but cellular processes switch from living to decaying dramatically quickly, and once you have decayed past the point of re-animation, that's dead.
See what I wrote above about "reanimation" from the informational artifacts you leave behind. I'm not saying that someone in the future could not create a reasonable Sir Issac Newton facsimile, mercury poisoning and all, such that you could shake his hand and hold a conversation with him (assuming he could understand your modern dialect)... but the body that was Sir Issac has been clearly dead and not-revivable for some time now.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday April 09, @03:27PM (2 children)
But the worms are animate, so if you are then part of the worms, are you not animate?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 09, @05:23PM (1 child)
Be that in the belly of worms, or bodybags from Vietnam... dead is dead.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday April 09, @08:07PM
From an egocentric perspective, probably yes.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday April 09, @01:03PM (2 children)
Hopefully nobody is thinking of using fMRI.
And no, 'working' for a dead salmon is not evidence of its utility.
Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction [prefrontal.org]
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday April 09, @01:08PM (1 child)
I should give a bit o' background:
BRAIN (Volume 140, Issue 8, August 2017, Page e53, [oup.com]https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awx180) [doi.org] : Dead salmon and voodoo correlations: should we be sceptical about functional MRI?
tl;dr - no, so long as the statistics are performed correctly...by biologists and neurophysiologists. Hmmm.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 09, @01:25PM
fMRI, the only field of research that makes one ponder: can we publish with a study group population size of zero? Less than zero?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09, @03:00PM (2 children)
Hm..., can you give a car analogy?
(Score: 3, Funny) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday April 09, @03:23PM
Is the car running better because I changed parts, or because I rebooted it?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 09, @03:28PM
>car analogy?
If your ECU fails, the engine won't run, you pull the ECU and manage to reboot it after tweaking a few stored codes, is that little stumble at 3000RPM a result of the original ECU problem, or something you introduced with your mods?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday April 09, @03:19PM (3 children)
From freediving and rebreather experiments I've learned that the unconsciousness of hypoxia comes on fast, and you don't see it coming. Without CO2 triggering your breathing reflex (and Panic) you are alive, awake, online, and then off like someone hit a lightswitch. Your autonomous responses, e.g. breathing, still continue but my recollection of the experience is that no-one is home.
It's entirely possible that one is entirely conscious during this state but locked in and lacking the ability to form memories or control muscle movement. That feels unlikely given the significant metabolic requirements for cognition. I struggle to see how that could be experimentally determined, but I'm ignorant of the field.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 09, @03:48PM (2 children)
In my younger years I had low blood pressure. Around age seven I was given a very loud alarm clock (Snoopy, with two big hammer-struck bells on top) that I tried to use to wake to get ready for school. It was so loud that I placed it in my closet with the door closed, but... jumping out of bed to go turn it off, I would pass out on the way to the closet and wake up some seconds later on the floor. That alarm clock lasted less than a week, but over the years I had similar experiences on several occasions.
By age 18 or so, I learned to recognize the onset - and I think the onset was getting slower and not running as deep. Instead of falling over, as it approached I would sit down, in the middle of the floor if necessary. One of the last episodes I remember clearly: feeling the onset, realizing that it wasn't going to "bottom" all the way out, reaching out to steady myself on a nearby counter, vision went black - with little blue sparkles for a bit before going altogether black, ears started ringing then went completely deaf, I was still aware of my breathing, heartbeat and balance and grip on the counter, then the process reversed with hearing returning sort of like through a tunnel with white noise dropping out, then the blackness faded back to full vision. I think I knew it wasn't going to be a "total loss of consciousness" event based on how my heartbeat was responding through the event, it was ramping up volume fast enough for a recovery. I believe there was also a major contribution to the events from blood rushing into my legs after standing up, I could somewhat feel the vessels of the legs constricting, just a little too late, eventually restoring upper body blood pressure.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday April 09, @04:45PM (1 child)
This sounds like a medical condition known as postural hypotension. Rapid changes in body position, particularly from prone to upright, can cause your blood pressure to drop rapidly. I experience them too, particularly upon waking or rising from a sitting position for a prolonged period. I learned to hold my breath, tighten my chest muscles and diaphragm to fight it, and that works 95% of the time. It makes me feel unsteady, warm, and my vision drops from color to grey. I describe it to others as "Someone just adjusted the contrast on the universe." Thankfully it's been a very long time since it knocked me out.
FWIW, it feels completely different from the Vagal response from e.g. seeing blood. I've experienced that as well. Special thanks to LiveLeak for helping me get over that in excruciating graphic detail.
On a completely unrelated note, I'll be having a cardiac ablation later this month to scar off some malfunctioning electrical pathways that infrequently cause Atrial flutter. I have no indication that the conditions above are in any way related to this. If I stop coming around, please know it has been a pleasure.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 09, @07:37PM
Best of luck with your procedure. What little I know about A-fib / A-flutter A-blation is that it's pretty low risk and pretty successful, but anytime there's anesthesia... and they swear they're getting better at that, too: 1/250,000 [google.com] - not quite $150K state lottery winner low, but reasonably low, and blood flow is nice to have.
I only went vaso-vagal once (and I know many people who that's the case for...) - mine wasn't blood, when I was about 10 I cut the web of a finger - held it tight against a paper towel and walked to the nurse's station 200 yards away, sat down, removed the paper and there was very little blood - I could see inside the cut to my tendons which were intact, and that was cool... looked closer and then I bent my finger and the tendons slid inside the opening as they do, seeing that motion did it. Next thing I remember was my first experience of smelling salts...
I definitely had some postural hypotention into my 20s, compounded with generally low baseline blood pressure. The abdominal tension thing helps some, but I think a lot of mine was in the quadriceps (I did a LOT of bicycle riding) and nobody told me that I could tense them to help fight the phenomenon and I didn't figure that out until my late 20s. I think I didn't learn to predict the depth of the event so much as how to plan for it and ride it out in stages- as the world goes grey, then black with blue sparkles, etc. just knowing that it will pass and that if it progresses far enough that I should sit down right where I am... many times it would recover without getting too deep.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday April 09, @07:15PM (1 child)
No study can change the fact that if you can interview the person, they may have been very nearly dead but they were never most sincerely dead.
You can't even know if what they report was something from while they were declared dead or if it was a confabulation that happened as they recovered and things started working again. They have, after all just gone through a pretty extreme experience.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 09, @08:06PM
Tell enough people they'll "see a light at the end of a tunnel" when they're almost dead and guess what they'll report when you ask them: "You were almost dead, what was it like?"
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 09, @09:10PM (1 child)
While everyone is reflecting on death today, let me be the first to say RIP Mr. Peter Higgs who has passed away on 8 April 2024 (aged 94).
Yeah, the "god particle" guy.
Will they have a mass for him - ya think?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday April 09, @11:04PM
>Will they have a mass for him - ya think?
125.35±0.15 GeV/c2 or 125.11±0.11 GeV/c2.
Somebody should tell the crematorium: Higgs remains massive even at very high energies.
🌻🌻 [google.com]