On 31 January 2014 02:51, Craig Weinberg <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > Had we not already discovered the impossibility of resurrecting a dead >> > person with raw electricity, would your position offer any insight into >> > why >> > that strategy would fail 100% of the time? >> >> Actually, we can sometimes resurrect a dead person with raw >> electricity in cases of cardiac arrest, which would previously have >> been defined as death. It's a case of the definition of death changing >> with technology. In future, there will probably be patients who would >> currently considered brain dead who will be able to be revived. > > > That does not resurrect a dead person, it just helps restart a still-living > person's heart. True, cardiac arrest will eventually kill a person, but > sending electricity through the body of someone who has died of cholera or a > stroke is not going to revive them. My point though is that there is nothing > within functionalism which predicts the finality or complexity of death. If > we are just a machine halting, why wouldn't fixing the machine restart it in > theory? We can smuggle in our understanding of the irreversibility of death, > and rationalize it after the fact, but can you honestly say that > functionalism predicts the pervasiveness of it? Death used to be defined as the cessation of heartbeat and breathing, so according to this definition you *could* resurrect a dead person with fairly simple techniques which "fix the machine". In the future, this may be possible with what is currently defined as brain death. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
