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These are among the wide-ranging questions explored in a new special report, ("Defining Death: Organ Transplantation and the Fifty-Year Legacy of the Harvard Report on Brain Death,") published with the current issue of the Hastings Center Report. The special report is a collaboration between The Hastings Center and the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School. Editors are (Robert D. Truog), the Frances Glessner Lee professor of medical ethics, anaesthesiology & pediatrics and director of the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School; (Nancy Berlinger), a research scholar at The Hastings Center; Rachel L. Zacharias, a student at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a former project manager and research assistant at The Hastings Center; and (Mildred Z. Solomon), president of The Hastings Center.
Until the mid-twentieth century, the definition of death was straightforward: a person was pronounced dead when found to be unresponsive and without a pulse or spontaneous breathing. Two developments prompted the need for a new concept of death, culminating in the definition of brain death proposed in the Harvard report published in 1968.
The first development was the invention of mechanical ventilation supported by intensive care, which made it possible to maintain breathing and blood circulation in the body of a person who would otherwise have died quickly from a brain injury that caused loss of these vital functions. The second development was organ transplantation, which "usually requires the availability of 'living' organs from bodies deemed to be 'dead'," as the (introduction) to the special report explains. "Patients determined to be dead by neurologic criteria and who have consented to organ donation . . . are the ideal source of such organs, since death is declared while the organs are being kept alive by a ventilator and a beating heart."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday January 05 2019, @06:11PM
How much, exactly? Your central nervous system "CPU" extends all the way down your spine, with no well-defined boundaries between aspects of consciousness. You flinch in response to pain long before the pain signal enters your skull - unless you *consciously* choose to suppress that reflex.
If all my central nervous system cells are dead, then I'd say with certainty that I am dead (well, the part that "I" cares about anyway). But if they're mostly still alive but not doing much? (there's no such thing as a brain with *no* activity in it) We really don't understand consciousness nearly enough to say "awareness is definitely not present".
"Brain death" is just a state where we can say that the odds of the individual ever regaining normal-looking brain activity, much less interacting with the world, are effectively zero. With existing medical technology - that's always the caveat. 100 years from now it may just take a quick zap from a neural-rebooter.