On Thursday, January 30, 2014 7:14:18 PM UTC-5, stathisp wrote: > > On 31 January 2014 02:51, Craig Weinberg <whats...@gmail.com <javascript:>> > 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, >
Only by doctors. That is the 3p physiological definition though. People did not define their own death that way. If that was ever truly the definition of death, then the invention of heart-lung machines would have marked the beginning of immortality. Forcing the heart to beat and the lungs to breath does not, in fact, resurrect someone who is actually dead. > so according to this definition you *could* resurrect a dead person > with fairly simple techniques which "fix the machine". Because the definition is fictional. According to fictional definitions, you could also resurrect a dead person by casting a spell. > In the future, > this may be possible with what is currently defined as brain death. > It still does not figure into any prediction of Comp. From a comp perspective it should be possible to resurrect specific modules of the mind and personality long after death. It should really be possible to piece together a person from their effects on the world really. By triangulating everything that an artist or writer produced, it should be computationally possible to reverse engineer them. As long as our browser history is intact, we are potentially immortal. Craig > > -- > 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
