3 - Human beings
Summary
Allow that we know something about what death, in general, is. What, now, can we know about human death? This is a matter of considerable importance, for human death, is, of course, our death. What is involved in our deaths? When do we die?
In this chapter I want to present and defend an account of human death. Death is the irreversible breakdown of the organism as a whole. There are human organisms. They die when they suffer irreversible breakdown as a whole. When does that occur? A now familiar, even if not fully established, view is that human death, and indeed all higher vertebrate death, occurs when there is irreversible breakdown in just one organ, the brain. Many people talk of brain death. I have signalled, already, my reservations about speaking of organ, as opposed to organism, death. But this phrase is widely used, and it would be inconvenient to try to avoid it here. So the view I want to consider is that we die when, and only when, our brains die.
In the section that follows I sketch something of the substance and development of the brain death account of human death. Our organisms are complex, and the brain particularly so, and there is a good deal of technical, scientific and indeed historical information involved in fully describing the goings on here.
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- AnnihilationThe Sense and Significance of Death, pp. 39 - 63Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2008