this is something that really bothers me. i’m wondering if others have the same annoyance:
whenever i hear about people who supposedly died and came back and reported seeing and experiencing an afterlife, all i can think about is how death is irreversible. quite literally nobody has ever died and then resurrected. reanimation hasn’t been observed a single time throughout all of human history. what happened instead is they were actively dying and their brain was reacting to shutting down. “of course,” you say reading this. but so many people accept the premise that this is remotely possible by not rejecting it immediately and that is the most frustrating part about all of this.
it confirms and demonstrates to me that humans are resistant to being fundamentally challenged even in the face of absolute certainty. most things in the universe are not absolutely known, but death is the rare, and perhaps only, exception. death is permanent in its natural occurrence. there is no 99.9% of the time, there aren’t any other ways to be dead (literal death), every single living thing will die. period. …unless humans figure something out.
so yeah it bugs me when people even entertain the idea that there’s something worth discussing or listening to regarding claims of “coming back from death.” like there are skeptics and people who are willing to listen to these assertions. …why? there is, literally, no chance they are describing an existence after death. death can’t be reversed. when a person appears clinically dead and then regains consciousness, guess what, they weren’t dead regardless of medical technology saying they were lol. we just aren’t able to detect the smallest indications of life.
/rant
First define death with measurable metrics on the human body. No where in this entire thread have you done so.
death is the cessation of all biological function. this process leads to a permanent and irreversible nonexistence.
So everycell or 1 cell or 500000 cells. What about the microbiome. How many spe iese of bacteria must remain or be gone. No what you have there is not a measurable metric on the human body.
we don’t know. i am not stating otherwise. something makes clinical death possible and it mimics death in a detectable sense. but the process of death reaches an irreversible point where total functionality ceases.
You may also be fighting history. We have definitions of death, and have had them throughout all history. But now we understand death is a process, and we are sometimes able to Intervene, even when people have passed the milestones historically associated with irreversible death.
Or you’re fighting practicality. You can detect whether or not a heart is beating, even without technology, and that is usually part of the death process. But medical technology will continue to improve, leading to possible interventions later in the process. You have a moving target. How can you even tell when all cells are finally irreversiblydead? This logic leads to the silly extrapolation of not being dead until after you’re cremated
i don’t know when they’re irreversibly dead lol. that’s the point. we don’t know how to guarantee death has occurred. this doesn’t mean it isn’t a moment in the process, it means we can’t detect when it happens. irreversible biological death has never been reversed, period.
Its not a matter of knowing. Its a definition of metrics. Youre not stating metrics. Youre stating an unfounded opinion based on intuition. Who says its irriversable. Just becuse we dont know how doesnt mean something is impossible.
it is observed as irreversible. i don’t feel the need to hold off speaking in absolutes here.
Your argument hinges on death being irreversible, but you also dismiss all (potential) examples of “resurrection” with “well, you weren’t really dead then, huh?”.
Anyway, a near-death experience doesn’t even require an actual death, medical or otherwise. Now, would you see “beyond the grave” when you’re only mostly dead? Probably not, no, I don’t see why we should trust any of those accounts. But they’re still interesting experiences to hear about, they’re pretty rare and maybe we can learn something about the edges of life from them.
biological death is irreversible. clinical death is not. calling both “death” is a misnomer and confusing. i dislike it. clinical death is a term used for when it really really really really really seems like somebody is dead. clearly, they weren’t really dead if they came back to life. biological death is not reversible at this point in time or even as far as we know.
probably not, no
lol probably? how about absolutely. because that implies we could get there while alive. not really an afterlife is it?
Yeah, but see, you’re just arguing definitions again. If it’s irreversible by definition, then of course it’s impossible to get back from it. But for all we know (and can detect), it’s possible to be in a state that is indistinguishable from “true death” (at least for a moment) and return to a state of life. So you can’t say with absolute certainty that those people weren’t truly dead, you can only argue after the fact based on your definition of “true death”.
And the same with “afterlife”: if they weren’t “truly dead” they couldn’t be in the afterlife when it’s defined as “the place you’re in when you’re truly dead”, but the afterlife would be completely unfalsifiable by that definition anyway, so who cares. They were in some state indistinguishable from death and still experienced something, call it what you want.
Again, I’m not saying NDEs prove the existence of heaven or whatever, but they are experiences people have when they’re super-duper close to death and that’s interesting. Is it the desperate hallucinations of dying neurons? Still interesting. So when you ask “why listen to these people when they’re clearly making shit up”, I answer “you can also make shit up if you’re clinically dead for a minute, I still want to hear it”.
it isn’t irreversible by definition. i am stating it is irreversible. death is the cessation of all biological function and this has never been reversed in human history.
it’s possible to be in a state that is indistinguishable from “true death”
yes, and that would be… a state, not death. indistinguishable is describing our ability to detect a difference, not the mechanics being absolutely identical. they are still separate processes.
i’ll give you that on “afterlife.” i have a point to make but it might just be something that annoys me personally and not worth getting into lol.
Your argument is based on a false premise — there are absolutely documented cases of people being dead in hospital settings who were revived.
This is completely false.
The difficulty is in correctly determining death, not that death has occurred and then was reversed. One of the causes is even “missing weak vital signs”, so the error is human.
Cool. I hope you understand I’m going to rely on the NIH’s definition of death more than some rando on Lemmy.
Dude you are still missing the basic philosophical premise of OP’s post regardless of how you want to define “death”. Also, I’m not sure if you’re trolling or what’s going on, but let me try to explain a thought I had prompted by this post also: For a religious person who claims to see God briefly after they “die” seems strange to me simply because their god would already know that they were going to be revived in mere seconds. Feels like these people think that they unlocked a hack or a way to cheat the system into seeing the afterlife, and obtaining evidence of god existence, in a way that goes around god’s big plan or whatever. Almost seems sacrilegious to suggest if you are a believer, right?
okay well i suggest you reread that article because it talks about limitations being able to detect death lol. it even mentions early that modern tech has reduced errors but not completely eliminated them.
Yes. And these are definitions and words. They get defined for various applications. I don’t think there’s a single “true” definition of “death”, not by the NHS, nor by anyone else. Someone can be dead per law, someone can be dead enough but you’ll still perform CPR on them. Or their head is missing and they’re really dead and you don’t do CPR. Other people still have vital signs and they’re so dead the doctors will remove their liver, kidneys and heart and transplant it to somebody else… There’s just several definitions of the word. So yes. Sure, per some definition people can be dead and then be resurrected. But that’s just a definition thing, not a real concept. It’s a bit weird to have non-permanent death, if you ask me. It’s useful for certain things to phrase it like that. But how a word is being used doesn’t tell us a lot here.
biological death exists regardless of our medical and legal terms.
Does it, though? All I can find is descriptions like this one: “Biological death marks the definitive endpoint of an organism’s life, representing the irreversible cessation of all biological functions. This profound transition signifies a state where […]”
Which leads me to believe it’s a point in time. Not a “thing” that “exists”. All I can see is how life exists. And we can’t really talk just about the absence of life as per your initial post. Because we all transitioned from not being alive to living. That happens when we’re born. I think what you were referring to is more an abstract process within a complex biological organism. And the specific effects on one particular organ. That of course exists. But even that is more of an abstract concept, made up of a plethora of real things happen.
i apologize but i’m not following. a biological organism will eventually cease to exist regardless of our medical and legal terms or our abstract and subjective beliefs. we did transition from not being alive to being alive, but never being alive to not being alive. you can come into existence in a different way you go out and the processes can be different as well. non-existence isn’t death. death is the process of transitioning from existence to non-existence.
