At What Point Is Something Actually Considered "Dead"?

Melix

Melix

Lord Legendary
The reason I ask is because I know a guy who has his own coroner's report. He got hit by a car and bled out in the ambulance the vehicle owner's friend called. For a full ten minutes, he had no pulse and no blood flowing through his veins. His heart wasn't pumping. I know some of you will bring up NDE's and say that it's a miracle he "came back into his body" or whatever, but he never blacked out in the first place. The whole time, without any blood, he was chattering away to the paramedics about where he lived and who he lived with and who were his emergency contacts while everyone else freaked out because he was talking and wide awake while he was flat-lined.





When he was taken to the hospital and they got his heart beating again (he was still conscious) they knocked him out with anesthesia and gave him three times the legal limit for morphine. The entire time, he said he could still feel his broken ribs and broken back. He also felt the surgeries.


When he woke up having had surgery on his back, he found out that one of his lungs had stopped and then re-started working after being filled with fluid.


He was pronounced legally dead three times.


And considering that he's up walking around, I think he's still alive.


Another guy in the town next to mine got in a car accident and was pronounced DOA at the hospital. He was placed in the freezing hospital morgue, but when a nurse walked through the morgue, he reached out and grabbed her hand. He was taken back into the hospital shortly after.


Plus, a news story about a "miscarried baby" that was put in a drawer in the morgue only to be found crying and hungry by the parents hours later.


So how do you tell what's really dead and what isn't? Apparently, the hospital's have no clue. I'd like to know.
 
That's really scary/creepy and I would personally doubt those stories, haha. Makes you think of all those buried bodies in cemeteries...Maybe zombies are real.


I think something is dead when...well, physically, I would agree with the hospital requirements (no blood pumping, no breathing, etc.) simply because I have learned no other way in telling when something is physically dead.


But, I also believe in some instinctive way of knowing when something is dead. There's just this internal sense that the being before you is no longer in its shell, so to speak. It's a strange feeling, but it's definitely there..but I've never experienced a "dead" person talking to me or "waking up" in a morgue. xD ..
 
The stories are true; the latter two were huge news and the first one is actually not my friend, he's my dad. He has scars on his abdomen and back from the car and the surgeries and a rather large lump on his head from when his head hit the car. (It's huge!) I didn't want to say it was my dad because it all happened prior to me being born and doesn't that make me the kid of a zombie?
 
Hmm...How dead does the brain have to be to be dead? 100%? What if part of the brain is still working but the rest aren't, or most are but one part isn't? @TheGunrunner What do you think?
 
I suppose when all detectable activity has simply stopped. He can't breath, his/her senses are gone, he/she can not move, etc. 100% is the point where you're dead but it's really all in the person's opinion. My own mindset is 'screw spirituality', so I automatically say 100% because I'm going for the literal (I hope that's the correct word) thought of being 'dead.' However, someone else could say that it's just the point where the his senses are gone, because he isn't experiencing life anymore and might as well be dead. It's in how you look at it I suppose, but since you asked, I stay with 100%.
 
Interesting thread - and very interesting story!


Now that we can detect brainwaves and such, I think I'd go with (physical) death officially occurring when all detectable activity has ceased. I don't have the words or the scientific knowledge to properly explain, but I know there's still a certain amount of activity when sleeping or in a coma, and that's the sort of activity that would need to be absent for being dead under my definition. Of course, at the moment we don't have portable brain scanners to tell us these things by the side of the road, but I'm sure they'll get here someday.
 
Gonna go all pedantic up in here...


Dead isn't a useful term. It's a convenient term, but it's not really a useful one, because what we consider "dead" will inevitably depend upon the level of medical technology available to us at a given time. Death, in a technical sense, is the permanent and irretrievable cessation of life, with life itself being an exceedingly nebulous term. The more we blur the barrier between alive and not-alive, the better we become at moving something from one side of that barrier to the other, the looser the definition becomes.


Dead, like alive, is a term that's useful in common-day usage because it's easy to look at and go "Oh, that's alive" and "That's dead", but, when trying to account for all facts, it gets very tricky. As such, if someone's head is thoroughly separated from their body, I can freely say they're dead (or will be soon). A skeleton is clearly dead. A body in a block of ice is quite dead.


But if I have the means to preserve a severed head and reattach it to the body, thus preserving life, are they dead still? What if I can thaw a person from ice and restore chemical function, provided they were frozen the right way? What if, using some kind of sufficiently advanced technology (read: magic), I can completely restore a skeleton to the person it was the moment before death? What makes them different than, say, someone who is in a coma or suspended animation?


In short, I'd call something dead when it's useful for me to do so in a common sense manner. If I need to get technical, I wouldn't use it because it's not technically useful; I'd say "cellular activity has ceased in the brain and it's begun to decay, and we have no way to restore it". Most often, though, death is a useful short-hand for this, so doctors will throw it in, instead of that verbose statement.
 
Also, brain activity is expensive, difficulty, and time-consuming to measure. It's simply not practical for everyday use. Lots of people die, and there are very good reasons to keep track of which ones, even if the area they die in doesn't have immediate access to an EEG machine—god forbid we insist on fMRI.
 
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