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Kalanthropos t1_jdbb7rn wrote

Reply to comment by flyfruit__ in What happens when we die? by darsenalmex11

There's a fascinating (though sad) case of a boy who became brain dead after contracting viral meningitis. I remember reading about it in a bioethics class. He lived for another 20 years without anything resembling a brain. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5102206/

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zekromNLR t1_jdo3ngp wrote

For a certain definition of "living", at any rate. His body was kept functioning, but there wasn't really a person living in it anymore.

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Kalanthropos t1_jdo4jwo wrote

That's the thing, it raises a lot of philosophical questions. How do we define "death" if we can maintain the unity and function of the organism by supplanting its systems? What is the appropriate use of this technology?

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zekromNLR t1_jdop6ko wrote

True. My personal answer to this is that I consider a "person" to be the processes that occur in the brain from which consciousness arises via some mechanism that is not yet well-understood, with the body more or less just being a vessel for those processes to occur in and for the consciousness to interact with the world.

And so my personal opinion is that the only real use for keeping a braindead body alive would be to keep its organs viable until transplantation, but I do understand that that is probably an opinion that is quite far to the materialist side of things.

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