The Future of Death

Why can’t we define death?

What does it mean to be “dead enough”?

What, exactly, is “the dying zone”?

Where is your personality physically located?

Where do frozen souls go?

What is a “corpsicle”?

Who will choose who dies – and when?

Who will choose who gets to be born – and why?

When does an embryo become an actual person?

If you were to create a clone of yourself, who would it be?

Can computers ever become ‘human’?

Can souls be ‘downloaded’?

Is immortality possible?  Is immortality desirable?

Where - exactly - would we all live?

What would it be like?

A moment’s contemplation on the implications of each of these questions makes one’s head spin. 

Any definition of death quickly becomes a definition of life.  And any definition of human life quickly becomes an enquiry into the very nature of ourselves, our dreams, our passions, our thoughts and our identity.

It is in the natural order of things that cells, organisms (that’s us), planets, stars and perhaps even universes are born, live and then die.  Very few organisms appear to have a conscious appreciation of their own mortality and perhaps only humans can articulate how that feels.  Now, for the first time in history, humans are equipped with medical, biological and computing technology that enables us to cheat the grim reaper.

It may even enable us to banish him from human affairs forever.............

For millennia, when your heart stopped beating, you died.  Medical knowledge was at a loss to reverse the process.  It is what is now known as ‘somatic’ or bodily death and for most of us it will continue to be the standard measure by which we are declared dead.

But the topic of defining death can be very complicated – and troubling.  There are many specialists from a number of related medical, legal, philosophical and ethical disciplines who are unhappy with our current definitions of death.  As leading bio-ethicist Dr James Hughes has observed  “These definitions were worked out twenty years ago to address the technology of the respirator, and are already falling apart”.   Some go so far as to suggest that, in their view, a pronouncement of death today is a pragmatic, but arbitrary, medical and legal construct, which amounts to no more than a statement that says, in effect, “Your affliction has exceeded our current level of medical skill, we are powerless to restore you to function and therefore we give up.”

To achieve a greater degree of refinement, advances in medical knowledge and medical technology have explored the concepts of ‘Brain Death’ and even more recently “Neo-cortical Death’ in an attempt to more precisely identify the moment at which an individual can be declared to no longer exist.  But in doing so, the medical community has run headlong into the ethicists and philosophers, who point out that eventually these refinements will need to address such thorny questions as “where is our personality and identity physically located?” and “how can we be sure of the moment when the person ‘inside’ the body has died - irretrievably?”.  For the moment the jury is out on when death can be said to occur.

To temporarily address this dilemma, we employ a relatively flexible definition of death, allowing a range of actions to be taken from termination of care, to euthanasia, to tissue retrieval and organ removal.  Medical ethicists have dubbed it “The Dying Zone”.  Not surprisingly, there is a fierce debate about the ethics of many of these activities. The most notable concerns the pre-mortem donation of organs from brain dead patients, but there are other related situations that are making the ethicists sit back and think ...... assisted suicide (is it murder?); stem cell sourcing from discarded embryos (is that murder too?); when should potential persons be treated as actual persons?....and so on.

The debate is at its fiercest in the emerging discipline of cryonics – the post- or peri-mortem freezing of bodies and heads for future resuscitation, (optimistically called ‘life extension’ by its practitioners).  Here, ethicists are asking “does a frozen brain continue to contain the encoded information of a potential future self-aware person – and if it does, who is that person and more importantly, are they still alive?”  It’s an important question for the cryonics community because it could help to keep them out of jail. 

Currently, removing the head of a living person is called murder, even if it is then frozen in anticipation of the development of sufficient medical skills at an unknown time in the future to bring that person back to consciousness.  For the time being, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, these individuals (known as “corpsicles”) are practically and legally dead.

But, argue the cryonicists, will that always be the case?  Clearly the frozen do not meet a consciousness-based definition of life based on continuous, waking sentience, much less self-aware personhood. 

On the other hand, if such a standard is applied too rigidly, people who are in deep sleep, who are hypothermically suspended but revivable, or who have been placed in temporary therapeutic states of arrest, would also be dead.  We want to continue to treat some non-sentient potential persons as “alive,” but which ones?  Sleeping or temporarily comatose people are likely enough to return to conscious personhood to continue to possess their rights as living persons – where is the line to be drawn?   Adopting the cryonicists definition of life would mean that the persistence of information encoding memory and personality inside the frozen brain should be considered life, even if that information will never be re-animated into self-awareness. But if a frozen person is sent to float eternally in space, what is the point of considering that a state of “life?”   They have tended to concentrate on the statistical probability of retrieval of the personality and have suggested the following definition of death...

 “Death can be said to have occurred when the patient cannot be revived to self-awareness, with continuity of previous memories and personality, because they have irretrievably lost that information, or we are unable to recover them, or they or their guardians do not wish them to be revived.”

The shift of emphasis is important.  Bio-ethicists are now suggesting that notions of death in the 21st century will have to move beyond physiological and neuro-electrical phenomena into the realm of consciousness and “person-hood”.  In turn, this will lead us into many turbulent topic areas, including brain remediation (cell replacements or even transplants), nanotechnology, cryonic suspension, stem cell research, apoptosis (cell death), organ transplants, extra-uterine fetuses, new forms of life that we will create (and patent?), cloning, tissue harvesting, human-machine cyborgs, intelligent, self aware machines (with legal rights?)...and so on. 

The struggle between anthropocentrists and biofundamentalists, on the one hand, and transhumanists on the other, will be fierce.  Each proposal for a means of extending human capabilities beyond our “natural” and “God-given” limitations – like ‘cheating death’ for example - or blurring the boundaries of humanness, will be fought politically and in the courts.  This isn’t just a can of worms, it’s a whole barrel of them.  As Dr James Hughes, a bio-ethicist and leading light in the Transhumanist Society has observed....

“Once technology has fully teased out the constituent processes and structures of memory, cognition and personality, and given us control over them; once we are able to share or sell our skills, personality traits and memories; once some individuals begin to abandon individuality for new forms of collective identity; then the edifice of Western ethical thought since the Enlightenment will be in terminal crisis”.

Immortality, anyone?